About the artist:

Jellal Ben Abdallah is a Tunisian artist and illustrator based in Sidi Bou Saïd. He studied at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis. His early drawings appeared in the first Tunisian feminist periodical Leïla in the 1930s. Ben Abdallah participated in the Salon Tunisien in 1942 and 1945, and established an atelier in Montparnasse in Paris in 1952. During the late nationalist and early postcolonial periods, he was associated with the École de Tunis**, an elite group of artists credited with forging a Tunisian artistic modernism.

Ben Abdallah’s corpus of work spans miniature painting, acrylic on wood and paper, gouache, and monument design. The majority of his finely detailed paintings depict quotidian life, idyllic women, surrealist imagery, horses, marine creatures, and ethereal seascapes. From 1950 he received numerous state commissions for decorative programs in civic buildings, notably those designed by architect Olivier-Clément Cacoub, including ceramic tile panels in the Palais des Congrès in Bizerte and the Hôtel les Palmiers in Monastir. Ben Abdallah has exhibited in Tunis and abroad since 1939. Following a retrospective exhibition in 2009, in 2010 his long career was celebrated with a solo exhibition of thirty paintings at the Galerie Atrium in Carthage entitled ‘Femmes, je vous aime!’

**The École de Tunis was an elite circle of Tunisian, French, and Italian artists formed in 1948 and credited for pioneering a Tunisian artistic modernism. Both the group’s membership and aesthetic purview evolved over the course of the late nationalist and post-Independence periods. Pierre Boucherle, a French artist born in Tunis, founded the group. With Tunisian independence in 1956 Yahia Turki became its president. Affiliation with the École de Tunis was exclusive to elite artists but fluid.

Citation for the above MLA: Gerschultz, Jessica. "Ben Abdallah, Jellal (1921--)." The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. : Taylor and Francis, 2016.