Abdallah Benanteur

Abdallah Benanteur was born in 1931 in Mostaganem, Algeria. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Oran beginning around 1946, attending sculpture workshops followed by several years of painting workshops, and is generally described as having completed his studies there by 1948. He moved to Paris in 1953 and, in the years that followed, attended evening classes at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, an experience associated with his shift from figurative painting toward non-figurative, color-driven abstraction.

Benanteur worked across oil painting, watercolor, gouache, drawing, and etching, and his mature work is often organized around desert and Saharan landscapes and forms drawn from poetry and illuminated manuscripts. In the 1970s he taught at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole nationale superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. From 1983 he exhibited annually at Galerie Claude Lemand in Paris, a relationship that continued for the rest of his career and that his estate has maintained since his death.

Benanteur died on 31 December 2017 at the Hopital Charles-Foix in Ivry-sur-Seine, France, at the age of 86. The date is corroborated by his representing gallery, French art press, and Algerian cultural press.

Benanteur is consistently described in French and Algerian art writing as one of the founders of modern Algerian painting, a status reflected in a 1970 exhibition at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the 1983 Biella International Prize in Italy, and a 2003 retrospective at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. His work is held in an estimated thirty museums and public collections across Algeria, France, Lebanon, and the Gulf. No verbatim critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Benanteur's best-documented auction result is L'Or des coupoles (Golden Domes), which sold for USD 43,750 at Christie's Dubai in October 2014; the exact day of the sale has not been confirmed. Auction-market aggregators indicate a further result in the USD 50,000 or higher band, but the specific work, house, and date could not be verified, so it is not reported here as a headline figure. Other confirmed results are modest: Poetes et le Champ sold for GBP 3,870 at a Phillips Modern and Contemporary Art sale, and small prints and works on paper have sold for well under EUR 3,000 at French regional houses such as Ader, Paris. No higher, fully documented public sale has been identified as of 2026-07-18.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Benanteur. Verification runs through Galerie Claude Lemand in Paris, which represents the artist's estate, the Succession Abdallah Benanteur, and which credits works accordingly in museum donations and exhibition catalogues. His auction market is comparatively thin, concentrated in French regional houses and a smaller number of Gulf sales, so individual results should be read in that context rather than as evidence of a deep, liquid trading history.