Yves Saint Laurent Museum Pays Tribute to Dutch Collector Bert Flint
The Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech, Morocco, presents an exhibition about Bert Flint, a Dutch collector and passionate defender of Moroccan heritage.
Bert Flint is a passionate observer and self-taught cultural anthropologist from the Netherlands with a deep affinity for Moroccan and sub-Saharan cultures. Through more than 60 years of dedicated observation of rural peoples and the objects they create, Flint has been able to access underlying paradigms of motifs, materials and techniques shared across tribes and geography.
In 1996, Flint founded the Tiskiwin Museum in Marrakech, a small museum bearing his personal stamp, to share with the public his collection of jewels, textiles, pottery, ceramics and more, and to reveal the deep, and often forgotten ties that unite Moroccan traditions to those of the Saharan world and to the broader African continent.
The new exhibition in the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech brings together works from Flint’s personal collection that bears witness to his vision of the diversity and richness of Berber traditions that have flourished from the Atlas to the Anti-Atlas and from the Sahara to the Sahel. The exhibition will be on view until 30 May 2021.
© Fondation Jardin Majorelle
The exhibition reflects a long history of friendship, admiration and collaboration between the Fondation Jardin Majorelle and Bert Flint. In 2018, the Foundation published a volume titled African-Berber Culture: Neolithic Traditions of the Sahara in North Africa and the Sahel Region in recognition of a generous donation of textiles that Flint gave to the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts (formerly the Berber Museum) in 2015.
This exhibition is another way in which the Foundation is pleased to honour the work of this extraordinary man. Opening a window onto the territories Flint has crossed and the cultures he loves, this exhibition draws strength from the way in which it connects territories and people across communities, landscapes and national boundaries, while at the same time recognising the unique diversity of each.
© Fondation Jardin Majorelle