The Algerian artist is still in search of an identity and an authentic iconography. Such a quest has been caught up in politics all along -- during the French colonial period, the war of liberation, the socialist realities of the post-war period, and the current FLN austerity confronting Islamic fundamentalism. The political culture in Algeria has been propelled by conflicting impulses. The revival of Orientalism and folkloric art after independence (especially seen in Dinet and Racim) was rejected by modernists, who favored abstract expressionism. Subsequently, art was marshalled in service of socialism, and a kind of censorship (or self-censorship) of expression was imposed. The quest continues.