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78 - Mohammed RACIM (Algiers 1896 - El Biar 1975) al-Sira al-Naba…
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Estimate €15,000 - €20,000
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Description
Mohammed RACIM (Algiers 1896 - El Biar 1975) al-Sira al-Nabawiyya, 1917 Opaque pigments and gold on paper 25.5 x 21 cm on view Signed and located lower right in Arabic and signed, located and dated in Latin letters lower left Mohamed Racim, Algiers 1917. *** Opaque pigments and gold on paper, signed and dated lower right in Arabic and lower left (sight: 10 × 8¼ in.) Painted in 1917. The present sheet, the text of which is taken from a biography of the Prophet by Ibn Kathir, a 14th-century Syrian theologian. Executed when the artist was only twenty-one, this sheet shows a remarkable early mastery. The composition is organised in the manner of the frontispiece pages of the great illuminated manuscripts: a unwan crowned with finely cut bells on a gold background, calligraphic cartouches in thuluth and naskh on midnight blue and gold backgrounds, scrolls of flowery arabesques punctuating the horizontal registers in a rigorously balanced rhythm. The title Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya - "The Prophetic Life" - inscribed in the central cartouche links this leaf to the tradition of biographies of the Prophet Muhammad. This illumination could be part of the collaboration between Mohammed Racim, the painter Étienne Dinet and the publisher Henri Piazza, which gave rise to several projects between 1916 and the early 1920s, the most famous of which is The Life of the Prophet Muhammad, published in 1918 at the request of the Ministry of the Armed Forces as a tribute to the Muslims who died for France in the Great War - a work written by Dinet in collaboration with the Algerian essayist Sliman Ben Ibrahim, for whom Racim did all the illumination. Executed in 1917, this sheet is one of the very first demonstrations of Racim's newly acquired mastery of the Persian repertoire. Two years later, the critic R. d'Artenac, reporting on the 1919 exhibition, hailed Racim as "a young master who should form a school and breathe new life into an art threatened with imminent extinction" (Mustapha Orif, "De l'art indigène" à l'art algérien", Actes de la Recherche en sciences sociales, No. 75, Paris, November 1988).
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About the sale Arab, African & Indian Modernities
Auction location
Auction time 06/18/2026 at 2:30 PM
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