Narrative Représentation in the Painting: The School of Tunis as a Model

Abstract

Abstract

The relationship between the painting and the narrative text goes beyond the writer's need for a painter as a hero for his novel and the painter's need for the subjects of fiction to turn them into paintings. This is what we tried to find out through the experience of the pioneers of the “Tunisia School" of Fine Arts, who gathered with the desire to tunisize Tunisian art and were able through their paintings to date and archive the customs and traditions of the Tunisians and their daily living within the old city and in the market places. They were inspired in their paintings in the beginning by the topics treated by the Orientalists. They have furnished their "narrative paintings" with places, times, characters, and events with techniques that differ from narratives. In the absence of words and lettres that narrate the events in a sequential and sometimes contradictory format and leave the characters, times and places for the imagination of the recipient, the color spaces, lines and shapes come to narrate fixed moments across the painting and change the presence of characters, places and temporal references to signs of an event that attracts the person for whom the narration is done (recipient) to the narrator (painter).