Jean Besancenot
By 1953, when he published his second major work about select pieces of jewellery in Morocco, Bijoux arabes et berbères du Maroc, he had become Head of the Iconographic Service of the Moroccan Office of Information.
[2] His work, composed of detailed descriptions, numerous black-and-white photographs, films, drawings and paintings, testifies to the history and aesthetics of Moroccan cultural heritage of the 1930s and 1940s, still little marked by Western influences.
[5] Commissioned by the administration of the French protectorate in Morocco, he collected ethnographic observations and records of traditional dress and lifestyles during his extensive travels in this country on three visits between 1934 and 1939, as well as during a longer stay between 1940 and 1945.
Some of his travel was in remote Jewish Berber communities, which prompted his remark about the small town of Tissint: "I had in front of me a group of human beings who were leading exactly the same kind of life as their ancestors 2000 years ago.
"[8] Besancenot first became known for his artistic illustrations and detailed descriptions of traditional folk costumes and other forms of personal adornment, including the jewellery of the Berber cultures in Morocco.
The other group of Jewish Moroccans, who had lived in the country since ancient times and were part of the Berber population, was represented by ornately dressed women and a boy of the southern regions.
With reference to the origins of Berber jewellery, he presumed influences of ancient Mediterranean traditions as well as of the caravan routes crossing the Sahara and of historical Roman and Carthaginian styles in the Maghreb.
For the less wealthy families, the negagefs [sic], women specialized in this kind of trade, rented their services for the duration of the wedding ceremonies, along with sumptuous clothes and especially the enormous quantity of jewels deemed essential for the bride to appear with honour and adorned like an idol before her friends, assembled in admiring curiosity.In contrast to these urban traditions, Besancenot acknowledged the harsh living conditions of rural women, marked by all kinds of domestic chores like fetching water, grinding cereals, preparing food etc.
To hold simple sheets of cloth together as a draped garment, for example, the characteristic fibula brooches were a necessity, and women often wore their full set of jewellery during their daily activities.
This uniformity began to change from the beginning of the 20th century, when these jewels still constituted "a tribal mark as certain as the women's tattoos or the patterns of the woollen blankets worn on their shoulders".
In an interview with the journalist Dominique Carré, he commented on his approach: "I wanted to prove that scientists very often pursue their investigations in a frame of mind that partially leaves aside the aesthetic aspect.
"[28] In the context of the movement of French ethnologists at the beginning of the 20th century, led by Paul Rivet (1876-1958) and Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), with whom Besancenot briefly studied in 1937/38, he used photography not only as an instrument to record the location and the subjects, but also as an artistic expression in its own right, marked by the interested gaze of its author.
[29] While the persons in many of his photographs were deliberately posing to present their dress and jewellery, others appear in a more natural context, for example Berber women weaving a carpet or dancing at a traditional ahwash performance.
[30] Based on his knowledge of Morocco, Besancenot was called upon in 1956 to write the geographical, historical and archaeological notes for the Hachette World Album Maroc, with photographs by Jacques Belin and Gabriel Gillet and an introduction by Moroccan novelist Ahmed Sefrioui.
[34] Towards the end of his life, Besancenot experienced financial difficulties and supplemented his income by selling new prints of his Moroccan photos, signed and accompanied by his ethnographic explanations.
[45] For the 1948 French movie Les Noces du Sable (Desert Wedding), Besancenot co-wrote the scenario together with film director André Swobada, with a commentary on this Moroccan folk tale written and read by Jean Cocteau.
[48] From December 1988 to March 1989, the Musée des arts africains et océaniens in Paris showed an exhibition of Besancenot's paintings from the book Costumes du Maroc.
[50][51] In 2020, Sotheby's auction house sold a lot of fifty-five recent photographic silver prints of portraits from Morocco, with explanations, signed and dated by Besancenot.
On a critical note, she commented on his perception that Berber draped garments were a "continuation of millennium-old traditions of the ancient Mediterranean races" and judged these ideas as common, stereotypical notions of all the scholars of his time.
