[This article appeared in August 2011 in the Algerian newspaper Le Soir. It was written by Barkahoum Ferhati, former director of Le Musée Etienne Dinet in Bou Saada, Algeria, and a cultural historian. It was translated into English with the help of Abdeljalil Benslim. It provides important new information about the artist's work in Algeria in the 1930s.]

Algeria’s promise to cxhibit the paintings remains unfulfilled

For painters certain journeys allow them to wed their own history to the history of the country they visit.

Algeria was a popular destination for travelers, painters and writers. From 1830 it became an essential contribution to the aesthetic education of European artists. The first painters were war reporters, accompanying armed forces—Horace Vernet, Eugene Delacroix or Eugene Fromentin. Other artists in search of the exotic East would follow this route, artists like Etienne Dinet and Edward Verschaffelt, accompanying the subjugators and electing to live there. Algeria then becomes a destination of true initiatory quest.

Women, certainly very few, were not far behind. Although at the beginning the women accompanied husbands or parents, the quest gradually became a personal decision undertaken alone. The first women who made the trip to Algeria were certainly writers such as Isabel Eberhardt and Hubertine Auclert.

Painters were in the vanguard. Americans were more aggressive to begin the trip of initiation without being chaperoned by a male. Thus in 1931, Juanita Guccione [then called Anita Rice], a young American painter, began, as it should, a trip that would eventually take her to Algeria. She started with Paris, then Italy, then Greece, then Egypt and finally arrived in Algeria where she landed in Bou-Saada. Enchanted by the “city of happiness,” she takes up residence. And as to end her wandering and permanently seal her fate with that of the city, she marries her guide with whom she has a son. But in 1935, [having fallen out with her husband] she returns with bitterness to her native United States.

Anita was born in 1904 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to a family of European origin but of modest means. She was the second of four children, coming after her sister Irene and before her sister Dorothy and brother James.

After the death of her father, Emmanuel Rice, her mother, Hilda Watermann, moved with her children to Brooklyn, New York. Anita was then 12 years old. After high school, like her sister Irene, she worked to support the family along with their mother. Dorothy got the privilege of registering first at the Pratt Institute and Art Students League. The Sisters Rice shared an artistic streak, cultivated by their mother and grandmother who loved the arts. Irene and Anita, encouraged by their youngest sister, Dorothy, were quick to enroll in night classes at Pratt. But the courses were only a starting point for their artistic training. Anita made plans to study in Paris. Indeed, to be recognized in the holy of holies of contemporary art, American painters had to make this rite of passage to Paris. They understood very early that they had no choice.

It will be recalled here that the French critics sneered at and taunted the Universal Exhibition in New York, organized in 1867, just after the  American Civil War: “This exhibition is unworthy of the sons of Washington. In the middle of our old civilizations, Americans have indeed strayed into a giant ballroom.” French taste then reigned over the world. The Americans had the raw materials, the geographical area, the economic means and dynamism. For the rest, including the visual arts, they were well aware that they represented to the Europeans a huge shift. It is in this spirit that Anita’s proposed trip found its purpose. She must mature. In the meantime, she had to find ways to finance her quest. To realize her dream, Anita worked hard. The dream was possible because  America in the 1920s flourished. Migrants flocked from around the world to help the construction industry in the country. This allowed a degree of opening of the country to women, blacks and foreigners. Paradoxically, at the same time it was building its country, America remained doggedly puritanical and conformist.

It was in this atmosphere that Anita lived. She worked as a model, model maker and copyist in various fashion houses. When her purse was sufficiently full, her travel plans matured. Her departure was certain when America suddenly collapsed under the weight of the 1929 Wall Street crash. This economic collapse led the world in the rout. But Anita did not give up her project. She sailed for France in the summer of 1931. She arrived in Paris, the center of the art world and the rallying point of independent art. But in Paris Anita grew restless and embarked on a trip she had not originally planned. She went first to Rome the inevitable, then to Greece where she would find the ancient past of the Western world. She met in Greece a colorful Western history and a still strongly felt Turkish presence. Wanting to meet the true East, she continued her journey. She sailed for Egypt, earning money drawing and painting the passengers and crew of ships. The dream of our adventurer did not stop there, she traveled westward to Algeria and then to Bou Saada where artists and writers had congregated. In Bou Saada she was regarded as dynamic, always in  motion, an American of her time. But Bou Saada, a quiet, small oasis named by novelists and artists “the enchanted,” lived to the rhythm of another time, that of contemplation and mysticism, far from the noise of civilization and hubbub of colonization that was in 1930 celebrating its centenary. Considered, in 1845, unfit for settlement, Bou Saada retained an authenticity that allowed it to evolve as a booming tourist attraction.

As early as 1920 the oasis is described in economic data as a tourist center. The city and the region lent themselves naturally to this new role. Artists flocked there to savor the “perfect authenticity.” Dinet and Verschaffelt stayed longer. Among other pilgrims to Bou Saada were Jean Seignemartin, Theodore Chasseriau, Gustave Guillaumet, Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde, Pierre Louys and the fellows of the Villa Abdeltif. Many, like Dinet, would remain for the rest of their lives. They left us beautiful written works and paintings of the city. Among the women, we can count IsabelLalla Zainab Eberhardt who came in 1902 to meet Lalla Zainab at the Sufi zawiya Rahmanya El Hamel, Colette in 1922 and much later, Simone de Beauvoir, who came in 1957, while the Revolutionary War was raging, and recounts her stay in Second Sex. By the 1930s Bou-Saada had become a pilgrimage essential to many artists, such as the Barbizon and Pont-Aven schools. Anita therefore could not escape the spell of the city. She fell in love with it and its people. She puts down her luggage and settles in. She takes up residence with an Englishwoman, Rose Fitzsimmons, who had settled long ago in Bou-Saada to cure her rheumatism. Anita quickly focuses on her young and handsome guide, Ben Aissa ben Mabrouk, who has mastered the language of Shakespeare. He becomes her guide and her lover. To get around these parts and follow the nomads, a woman could not venture alone. Isabelle Eberhardt  disguised herself as a man to move about in the world of men. Cross-dressing became a necessity for adventurers. Anita and Isabelle put on pants to be able to move with ease, pacing the Sahara on horseback, following the nomads. Gradually her love for her guide grew and she became pregnant. The puritanical administrator of Bou Saada was not enchanted, nor was her guide, for that matter. Troubles began then for Anita. The administrator of Bou Saada accused this feisty German-speaking American of spying for Germany, with which relations had begun to deteriorate. [Strangely Eberhardt , too, was accused of the same act.] After two years of happiness, Anita had to leave Bou Saada for Algiers, where she found refuge under the protection of the American consul. Her son, Djelloul, was born in August 1934, [the year Albert Camus completed his studies at the University of Algiers.] Discord arose over custody of the child. She was refused an exit permit for her son and had to smuggle him into England and then the United States. Back in her own country, more trouble lay ahead. How to retain custody of this small French and American citizen? It was a real headache, involving the American immigration service which had tightened its enforcement procedures. With the support of her family, she obtained custody and the naturalization of his son. Despite these worries, she did not return empty-handed: she brought home more than 200 paintings and drawings. In 1935-36 she organized the first exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum under the signature of Nita Marbrook. Although this show received only modest critical attention, The New York Times  recognized an American artist who “managed to show the true face of the French colony. Without the false colors of Orientalists like Delacroix or Etienne Dinet.” The newspaper said she had shown an image worthy of the Algerians, especially the women. Somewhat disappointed, she packed up her Algerian oeuvre and showed it no more. Her Algerian story seemed closed. Gradually she lost hope of being reunited with her child’s father. To cut short the child’s questioning, she told him his father and kin had died in a famine that swept the country in the thirties.

Renaming herself Juanita, she immersed herself in art studies and teaching as Americans regained confidence because of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. She worked for the new Works Progress Adminsitration on murals in public buildings. Those were the days of the automobile, radio, Hollywood, aviation and skyscrapers (Chrysler Building, Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center). The influx of artists fleeing the repression of fascism and Nazism would inspire an unprecedented artistic vitality in Americans. Taking advantage of this improvement, Juanita enrolled at the School of Fine Arts, the prestigious institution founded in 1934 by Hans Hofmann, German mathematician and artist who fled Nazi Germany. It was originally focused on pointillism, a technique which she embraced enthusiastically. She joined her sister Irene [Rice Pereira], who co-founded the WPA’s Design Laboratory. This laboratory offered an opportunity to experiment with methods that combined physics, chemistry and painting.

Juanita attended classes taught by Amédée Ozenfant, founder of purism with the architect Le Corbusier. She attended the trade fairs and exhibitions that abounded in New York City.

Djelloul, her son, was befriended by Dominick Guccione, her landlord and a prosperous businessman. Juanita met Guccione through this accidental encounter and in 1943 married him. She could then devote herself to art without worrying about the future. Imbued with this culture, then her work is a reflection of the artistic trends in fashion in New York, social realism, surrealism, cubism, abstraction, pointillism, mechanization, etc. She began exhibiting in prestigious New York galleries.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor moved America  into a united front against the Axis Powers [Germany-Italy-Japan]. Paradoxically, while Europe was ablaze, America boomed. New York replaced Paris as  the center of the art world.

It would be a long time before Juanita would look eastward again, and this time it was prompted by her son. Under his initiative, in her 87^thyear, she agreed to dust off her  Algerian. Under the auspices of the United States Information Agency and the Algerian government   the work was exhibited in 1991 in the Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions of Algiers under the title “From New York to the Casbah of Algiers.”

More than 20 paintings and 36 drawings of Bou-Saada and environs received a warm welcome from the Algerian public. Her son had never wanted to change his name, confident that one day he would discover his origins, because he had never believed his mother’s version. This exhibition allowed him to take a first step to find his family. Unfortunately, 1990  was the “year of blood,’ and conditions were strained. But thanks to research conducted by the embassy of Algeria in Washington and by a happy chance, he finally traced his family to Bou-Saada.

But Juanita Guccione died in 1999 in New York. She is buried in a cemetery of famous artists of Woodstock, New York. In 2004, Djelloul offered his mother’s Algerian work to Algeria via sale at a nominal price  to cover his expenses over the years. The 174 paintings, watercolors and drawings were sold to Sonatrach with the condition they would be shared permanently with the Algerian public, particularly the Bou Saadians.

In collaboration with the Algerian embassy in  Washington and then Ambassador Idriss Jazairy the work was shown at The Washington Arts Club in a show curated by Lavinia Wohlfarth. The work was then shipped to Algeria.

Algeria, represented by the minister of culture and communication, Ms. Khalida Toumi, then spokesman for the government, signed a bilateral agreement on cultural exchanges with the U.S. ambassador in Algiers, Janet Sanderson, by which the U.S. would be able to offer its public an exhibition of the works of artists like Omar Racim, Haminou, Mena and Kechkoul. Algeria, for its part, under the this protocol, agreed to undertake “the creation of a contemporary art museum on behalf of the American artist, Juanita Marbrook.” This agreement was duly reported in the daily El Mujahid. A museum of modern art expected in Algeria! Already by 1964, the education minister, Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi Al, in charge of culture, promised the creation of a modern art museum in a speech on the occasion of a famous exhibition entitled “Art and Revolution” that brought together artists who donated their works to support “the new Algeria.”

No longer would contemporary art be considered subsversive. In 2007, the Museum of Modern Art in Algeria, the LAM, was finally born. But the work of Juanita Guccione is absent, remaining instead in Sonatrach’s headquarters. Nor are the holdings of the National Museum of Bou-Saada present in the new museum. And so Algerians are still  waiting patiently to see the work of Juanita Guccione while her son urges Sonatrach and the government to keep its promises.—Barkahoum Ferhati