In memory of Bert Flint
May 24, 1931 – November 1, 2022
The Tiskiwin Museum was founded by Bert Flint, who was born in 1931 in the Netherlands where he studied Spanish language and literature at the University of Utrecht.
A visit to the Alhambra of Granada aroused in him a keen interest in the history of Muslim Spain and the civilization of Al Andalous. – During his first trip to Morocco in 1954, he saw that the architecture and interior decoration of many private houses in the ancient cities of this country are linked to the same artistic tradition that inspired the art of the Alhambra. More surprising for him was to note that the inhabitants of these houses lead a life in which the daily quest for beauty in presentation and elegance in gesture seems the very purpose of existence.
The Andalusian tradition as it is still lived in Morocco was then revealed to Flint as a model of life and he decided to settle in Marrakech (1957) in order to learn about the different aspects of this perfect city tradition. Paradoxically, however, it was the visual and musical manifestations of the Moroccan rural world that gradually caught his attention and finally exerted such an attraction on his artistic sensitivity that he converted from a nostalgic lover of the city tradition inherited from Al Andalous into a passionate defender of Moroccan rural culture. In several aspects of it, he recognized the deep links between Morocco and the Saharan world and the African continent.
To better understand these links, he has focused his research in recent years on the material culture of the populations of the Saharan Diaspora based on objects from his personal collection that encompasses all of North West Africa and which concerns more specifically the field of the Art of the Arnure.