Marrakech: The Yves Saint Laurent Museum Brings Desert Explorer Odette du Puigaudeau Out of the Shadows

ince Saturday, October 3, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech has devoted its new exhibition, “Sur les traces d’Odette du Puigaudeau,” to one of the keenest observers of the nomadic cultures of the Sahara, a woman unjustly forgotten. Born in Saint-Nazaire in 1894 (she died in Rabat in 1991), the daughter of the painter Ferdinand du Puigaudeau was a scientific illustrator, a designer at Jeanne Lanvin and a deckhand on Breton tuna boats before she left Douarnenez on November 28, 1933 with the painter Marion Senones, bound for Mauritania with no official mission and at their own expense. More than two hundred works and documents (drawings, watercolors, photographs, manuscripts, objects, sound archives and films) from the Pierre Berge Museum of Berber Arts, the Jardin Majorelle Foundation and private collections trace that journey until March 7, 2027.

From Chinguetti to Oualata and on to Timbuktu, she would spend five years fully immersed among the nomads, follow the azalai, the great salt caravan of Taoudeni, in the winter of 1937, and record one hundred fourteen rock engravings in the Oued Tamanart valley. Settled in Rabat in 1961, the two travelers would never leave Morocco again: Odette du Puigaudeau would head the prehistory office of the Museum of Antiquities from 1970 to 1977 and complete there Arts et coutumes des Maures, the sum of thirty years of observation. Curated jointly by Hayate Machache, the museum’s head of collections, and by her biographer Monique Verite, the exhibition is the very first devoted to her in Morocco, the country she had chosen. A tent of black and brown wool, pitched at the heart of the route, brings her daily life back.

Photo: a decorated doorway in Oualata, one of the towns Odette du Puigaudeau documented. Kurt Dundy at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0.