Mohamed Mrabet

Mrabet is recognized as an important member of a small group of Moroccan master painters who emerged in the immediate post-colonial period and his works have become highly sought after, mostly by European collectors.

• Name — Mohamed Mrabet • Born — 8 March 1936 • Birthplace — Tangier, Morocco • Field — Author, painting • Birth Name — Mohammed ben Chaib el Hajam

Mohammed Mrabet was born in Tangier, which was an International Zone from 1923 to 1956. His father enrolled him in a Koranic school at the age of four, then in 1943 at L'ecole public de Boukhachkhach. From 1946 to 1950, Mrabet worked as a caddie at the Royal Tangier Golf Club and thereafter as a fisherman, until 1956, when he met an American couple, Russ and Anne-Marie Reeves, at the Café Central in Tangier's Petit Socco, and remained friends with them for several years. They leased the Hotel Muneria (Tangier Inn) in Tangier, and Mrabet worked there as a barman from 1956 to 1959, when he accompanied them to New York, where he stayed with them for several months. His account of his relationship with this couple is semi-fictionalised in his autobiography Look and Move On. Upon his return to Tangier in 1960, he resumed his life as a fisherman and began to paint (his earliest drawing known to originate in 1959) and met and became friends with Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles, the latter, who, being impressed by his storytelling skills, became the translator of his many prodigious oral tales, which were orated from a distinctive "kiffed" and utterly non-anglicized perspective and published in fourteen different books. Throughout the 1960s until 1992 Mrabet dictated his oral stories (which Bowles translated into English) and continued work with his paintings. His books have been translated into many languages, and in 1991 Philip Taaffe collaborated with Mrabet for the illustrations of his book Chocolate Creams and Dollars. Mrabet continues to paint and holds periodic art exhibitions, mostly in Spain and Tangier. He lives in the Souani area of Tangier with his wife, children and grandchildren.

• Look and Move On 1976, Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara

• 1970 – New York at the Antaeus office, USA • 1970 – City Lights Bookshop, San Francisco, USA • 1988 – La Gallerie Paul Mauradian, Lyon France • 1989 – Cavin-Morris in New York. (Pen and Ink drawings exhibited) • 1991– La Gallerie Art en Marge, Bruxelles, Belgium • 1997– Hotel Continental, Tangier, Morocco • 1998/04 – Akhawain Universite de Ifrane, Morocco • 1998/08 – Galerie Aplanos, Cultural Museum of Assilah, Morocco • 1998/09 – Museum of Immigration, Douai, France • 1999 – University of Charleston, S.C; USA • 2002 – Galeria Tarifa, Tarifa, Spain • 2003 – Institut Cervantes, Tangier, Morocco • 2004 – Darna, Women's Community Centre, Tangier, Morocco • 2006 – Dawliz Complex, Tangier, Morocco • 2006 – August The Lawrence-Arnott Art Gallery, Tangier, Morocco • 2007 – October/November El Minzah Hotel, Tangier, Morocco