André Elbaz

André Elbaz (born April 26, 1934, El Jadida, Morocco) is a famous Moroccan painter and filmmaker.

Born to a Jewish family,[1] Elbaz studied art and theatre in Rabat and Paris from 1950 to 1961. He started painting only at the age of 21, until which age he had been interested mainly in theatre. A few years later, he managed to combine his two passions into a new approach in art-therapy, inventing together with his wife, a psychiatrist, the Pictodrame, which brought him world recognition.

His first exhibition, which was very successful, took place in Casablanca in 1961 and earned him an appointment as Professor at the Beaux-Arts school in Casablanca. Years later, in 1976, he exhibited his paintings at the Tel-Aviv Museum.

In parallel to his career as a painter, Elbaz is also known as a filmmaker. He produced several short films in France, Canada and the United States. One of them, La nuit n'est jamais complète (The night is never complete), won a prize at the "5th Biennale de Paris in 1967" . Among the themes chosen for the many films he produced, there was a short one about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as well as a series of drawings entitled Seuls (Alone), with texts written by both Elie Wiesel and Naim Kattan. Both the short movie and the drawings were a result of his fascination by Holocaust related themes. This fascination also inspired him for other works that were shown at an exhibition at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, in 1985. His paintings are famous for boasting traditional Jewish themes and he often present them in a chiefly expressionist style.

A retrospective of his lifetime achievements and works was held in 1990 at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris.