Entitled “Special Flag”, this major exhibition marks a milestone as the first of its kind devoted to the flag as a motif in the visual arts. The Moroccan flag certainly offers considerable appeal in both form and colour. In “On Colour”, one of his most important writings on painting, the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire writes: “Let us imagine a beautiful expanse of nature where everything turns green, glows red, shimmers and sparkles in complete freedom; where all things, variously coloured according to their molecular structure, altered from second to second by the shifting of light and shadow, and stirred by the inner workings of heat, exist in a state of perpetual vibration that makes lines tremble and fulfils the law of eternal and universal movement.” It is difficult not to think of the Moroccan flag when reading these words, through which Baudelaire expresses his ideal of colour.
The flag has attracted painters and visual artists since at least Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, through the Impressionists and Pop Art, and continues to be a favoured subject among contemporary artists. Its appeal has been such that some have elevated it to the status of a genre, notably Jasper Johns, whose reputation is inseparable from his Flag series.
