Yahia Ben Mahmoud El Hajjem

Place: Constantinople

Born: 1902

Death: 1969

Biography:

Yahia Turki, also known as Yahia Ben Mahmoud El Hajjem, was a Tunisian painter born in 1902 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey) and died in 1969 in Tunis, Tunisia. He is considered the 'father of Tunisian painting'. Turki studied at the Centre d’Enseignement d’Art in Tunis for five months during the 1920s, but he was considered a self-taught painter. His first exhibition was in 1924, and he became a member and later president of l'Ecole de Tunis, which was created in 1947 by Pierre Boucherle in an attempt to gather Tunisian artists, regardless of their religious, racial, or artistic background, and with the common interest of establishing a Tunisian painting style. Turki portrayed Tunisia through scenes of quotidian life, architectural spaces, landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. He painted murals in the École d’Agriculture de Moghrane in the 1950s.