A Garden of Controversy: Jardin Majorelle, Marrakech, Morocco
Rue Yves St Laurent, Marrakech 40090, Morocco
When you’re vicisting Marrakesh, you are most likely told to visit Jardin Majorelle — a real oasis of freshness and greenery under the burning Moroccan sun. Colonial aesthetics and artistic reinvention are well kept for tourists as a cultural heritage gem. Tourists love it. But when you think and read deeper about this Garden of expression and freshness, lots of dark secrets come afloat.
For me as an art historian, this garden seem as an important cultural artifact in its own right. Whilst many come here to have a rest from the heat only, many come there for aesthetic intent and cross-cultural exchange as well. It is truly magnetic at first sight.
Designed in the 1920s by French Orientalist painter Jacques Majorelle (1886–1962) and later restored by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé (read below more about these two), the garden is indeed a masterpiece of imagination, love for nature and unique modernism|art deco exemplar.
It is full of North African flora — cacti, bougainvillea, date palms. It is highly stylized, almost theatrically. The famous “Majorelle Blue”— is a pigment oscillating between ultramarine and cobalt — that covers the Art Deco villa. Whilst for many it is a beautiful background for Instagram pictures, it is a whole special chromatic feature in architecture altogether.
Wikipedia Commons
Jacques Majorelle, son of the celebrated Art Nouveau designer Louis Majorelle, brought with him the legacy of decorative arts and a fascination with the so-called ‘exotic’. His canvases (have a look at them!), often overlooked today, echoed the visual language of the garden: they are highly composed, color-saturated, tinged with an Orientalist gaze. Yet the garden remains his most famous (and most problematic) work. It mixes a deep sensitivity to Moroccan motifs and the spirit that is rooted in European artistic appropriations of non-Western culture.
Saint Laurent and Bergé did more reframing than restoration. They intervened and turned the garden into a kind of shrine, to Majorelle, yes, but also to a fantasy of Morocco as a some sort of a place of liberation and aesthetic freedom.
Saint Laurent famously called the country his “refuge”. However that refuge was built on a legacy of French colonial presence in North Africa, but that’s a part of the story the garden quietly leaves out, choosing instead to tell a more beautiful, appealing version.
Today, the Jardin Majorelle also houses the Berber Museum. It tries to fix part of that unfairness by showing the culture of Morocco’s Indigenous people through textiles, jewelry, and traditional objects. The museum’s careful display offers an important contrast. It reminds us that the garden exists in a place with its own rich culture and visual traditions. But the difference is striking: the museum feels calm and respectful, while the garden is bold and showy. This contrast says a lot about how the West has long been drawn to owning and reimagining other cultures.
Wikipedia Commons
Controversial side begins here
Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. There are a mountain of rumors about dark life of this couple. Their drug addiction, volatile behavior and physical deterioration are no secret. Their holidays in Morocco were also not that innocent. Local people confirm — these two are known in Morocco not only for their “philantropical” motifs, but also for their forcefull relationship with moroccan teen boys. I leave it up to you to form your own attitude and feeling towards this villa. I, personally, can’t fet rid of this background echo of something dark and bad had been happening here.
