Technical information
- Title : Portrait of the Moukère
- Date : 1927
- Technique : Watercolour
- Dimensions : 27 × 20 cm
- Location : Unknown
Biographical / historical context
In 1927, André Breuillaud continued his exploration of marginal zones (the ZM segment) while also opening this cycle onto a series of portraits made in contact with the working-class districts of northern Paris—Barbès, the Goutte d’Or, La Chapelle, Saint-Ouen, Montmartre—where the presence of North African communities was then strongly perceptible. Alongside the vein of wasteland, vacant lots and “zone” figures, a direct interest emerges for faces: no longer only as social signs, but as centres of presence and inner tension.
The title uses a colloquial term current in the 1920s to refer to a North African woman. Breuillaud does not indulge in anecdote: the sheet reads rather as a meeting and an attentive notation, in which frontality and the gaze become the main stakes. The work sits at the heart of 1927, when the artist already combines a sure analytical drawing with a freer, more expressive watercolour, in direct dialogue with Mazilia, more intimate in tone.
Formal / stylistic description
The composition is centred on the face, treated almost frontally, like a mask held by a deliberately economical means. The intensity resides first in the gaze: two black, elongated eyes set like a bar of tension that immediately fixes the reading. The mouth, firm and closed, and the pronounced line of the nose reinforce the sensation of psychological density.
The watercolour, rather dry and nervous, privileges a warm range—reds, browns, ochres—heightened by the veiled yellow of the turban. Dark zones concentrate around the eyes, mouth and certain contour accents, while transparent washes allow the paper to breathe around the volumes. Blue-black marks on the forehead, chin and cheeks suggest traditional tattoos, recorded without descriptive overload and integrated into a personal graphic syntax.
The sheet retains visible sketch passages and areas left open, in particular on the right, where a red-orange gesture spills over and projects an almost incandescent energy. The silhouette remains schematic: Breuillaud concentrates the expressive material on the architecture of the face, the site of a silent dignity rather than of the picturesque.
Comparative analysis / related works
The work belongs to the group of ZM portraits of 1926–1929, in which Breuillaud depicts, from life, figures encountered on the margins: workers, ragpickers, fairground people, travellers, and people from North African immigration. Through its frontality, it answers Mazilia in counterpoint: where Mazilia establishes inwardness and softness, Portrait of the Moukère asserts a more direct presence, an intensity that is almost abrupt.
Within the works on paper, the sheet also demonstrates the artist’s capacity to shed the paste and the weight of the dark “zone” landscapes in order to seek an immediate expressiveness. One may sense, without imitation, a distant dialogue with certain freedoms of modern orientalism (in terms of line and sign), but the focus remains psychological: the gaze is not decoration—it is a nucleus of tension.
Justification of dating and attribution
The date 1927 is consistent with the intensive use of watercolour in these years, the nervous drawing, and the way transparent washes and dry accents are integrated. The sheet closely accords with the group of portraits made around the same districts and with the diptych formed with Mazilia, of which it constitutes the frontal and more incandescent counterpart. No formal or material element contradicts this attribution.
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Location unknown.