The history of visual arts in Morocco can be classified into two main periods: 1912-1956 and since the independence until today.

The first period concerns the birth and the beginnings of the pictorial practice. It refers to the first European painters who settled in Morocco under the French protectorate.

It is “The colonial school” whose essential vocation was the initiation of a provincial and exotic painting. Some self-taught Moroccan artists devoted themselves to this new type of expression: easel painting. Accordingly, the first generation of naive representational painters emerged, reproducing, each one according to the technique learnt from European artists, the scenes of the Moroccan social life, thus a certain form “of pictorial ethnology ". The representatives of this only and unique tendency which lasted even after the independence of Morocco are: Mohamed ben Ali R' Bati, Abdelkrim Ouazzani, Moulay Ahmed Drissi and Ben Allal.

The teaching of visual arts in Morocco began in 1945 with the creation of the School of Fine Arts in Tetouan - city under Spanish protectorate - and that of Casablanca in 1950.

After the independence and during the 1960s in particular, the Moroccan pictorial practice witnessed a new development in terms of the artistic vision and expression.

The Moroccan artist-painter, a self-taught or having undergone a robust academic training in France and Spain, played a major role in the cultural scene: to act as an essential opinion relay and a medium of a specific and open national culture at the same time. Therefore, an entity of Moroccan artists emerged and had Ahmed Cherkaoui and Jilali Gharbaoui as precursors, the former working on the sign in popular culture and the latter on abstraction.

Until today, it has been a profusion of names with an increasingly intense artistic activity, accompanied with a consequent debate of ideas:

Meghara, Ben Yessef … (representational artist), Melihi, Chebaâ, Bellamine, (Abstract), Belkahia, Kacimi (the sign), Saladi, Chaïbia (fantasizing, naive), etc.

Although it found it hard to impose its presence in the plastic practice in morocco, several names, however, appeared in the art of sculpture: Boujemaâ Lakhdar (wood sculpture), Omar Youssef (stoneware and terra-cotta technique), Abdelkrim Ouazzani and Abderrahmane Meliani (exposition of articles).

There is a great need for art galleries since, in addition to the National Gallery of Bab Rouah in Rabat and the Allal El Fassi Showroom, located at the headquarters of the Ministry of Culture, the number of  private showrooms increases in other places mainly in the Rabat – Casablanca axis.

Finally it is worth mentioning that the Association Marocaine des Artistes Plasticiens (AMAP) was created in the 1970s to order and defend the interests of the pictorial practice and of its worthy representatives.

http://www.art-tisse.com/
 http://www.bladi.net/,
http://www.minculture.gov.ma/