Baya is one of those rare female artists who was more famous in her lifetime than after her death. One of Algeria’s most influential painters, Baya was ‘discovered’ in 1947 at the tender age of 16 by a French art dealer. While still an adolescent she was catapulted onto the Parisian art scene; André Breton wrote the preface to her exhibition catalogue and Picasso invited her to work alongside him. But since her death in 1998, Baya’s vivid, dream-like paintings have lapsed into obscurity.
Fort Mers-el-Kebir, Oran, Algeria
90 years ago, in 1931, Baya was born Fatima Haddad to a Kabylie family on the edge of the glittering Mediterranean basin, during the French colonial period. Orphaned as a small child, Baya was cared for by her grandmother who worked for a family of French horticulturists, including Marguerite Camina Benhoura, the highly cultured French wife of an Algerian judge. Benhoura noticed the child crafting fantastical scenes out of mud and pebbles and took Baya under her wing. Benhoura herself painted, but above all she was a collector; as Benhoura’s adoptive daughter, Baya was introduced to the works of Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Joan Mirò.
Benhoura opened a world of possibilities for Baya: she showed Baya’s paintings to the French modernist art dealer Aimé Maeght, who was so taken with the child’s work that he granted her a solo exhibition at his Paris gallery in 1947. (Galerie Maeght still exists, and is situated on the elegant Rue de Bac on Paris’ Left Bank). All of a sudden, Baya was plucked from a life in domestic service and dropped into the intellectual, experimental cultural scene that was post-war Paris.
Vogue featured a full-length photographic portrait of the young girl; she is dressed simply in a modest navy tunic and striped trousers, wearing traditional Algerian shoes and trailing a silk square printed with her own patterns. The interview was conducted by the great French journalist and writer Edmonde Charles-Roux, who went on to become editor-in-chief of French Vogue in 1954, and later won the Prix Goncourt (France’s most prestigious literary award). Paris pulled out all the stops for Baya.
Baya, Deux femmes, (Two women), 1947; Gouache on board, 24 3⁄4 x 18 7⁄8 in. (62.9 x 47.9 cm); Collection of Adrien Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France © Photo Galerie Maeght, Paris
Baya became a child star overnight, and it is not hard to see why. Her paintings dance with life and freedom. Women – bold, unveiled and unconstrained– dominate these early works. In ‘Deux Femmes’ (1947), two curvaceous female figures with bird-like features play with a trailing vine of hearts. One has enormous turquoise hair that cascades down the back of her ruby gown, decorated with a floral motif.
Often, the female form and nature are one, as patterns of leaves and flowers climb up the women’s bodies. In ‘Femmes et orangers fond blanc’, ripe oranges burst forth from the branch into the space at the centre of the composition. You can almost smell the scent of citrus blossom. Baya’s nature-inspired visual language, encompassing fruit, flowers and birds, and her ‘arabesque’ patterns are reminiscent of Islamic art, and ceramics, tiles and textiles in particular.
But despite the harmony and exuberance in the paintings, all is not always as it seems. Women, birds, fruit, often have symbolic meanings and hint at a darker reality. In several of her early works – such as ‘Femme et oiseau bleu’ and ‘Femme et enfant en bleu’, where a woman lovingly cradles a child – the sense of intimacy and security hint at an orphaned child’s longing for love and security. For Baya, painting was the chance to construct an imaginary, happier alternative. In an interview later in life, she described the exhilaration of painting as “I am in another world. I forget everything”. This is art therapy before the term was popularised.
ArrayBaya’s rich imagination and expressive style captured the attention of some of the most revered cultural figures of her day. André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, sang Baya’s praises in the preface to the exhibition catalogue, Behind The Mirror, writing that “I speak not as many others do, to deplore an ending, but to promote a beginning, of which Baya is queen. The beginning of an age of emancipation and harmony, a radical break with all that came before…”. Picasso was enchanted by her, and for several summers they worked side-by-side at the Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris, southern France, where Picasso was based from 1948-1955. The great cubist artist often credited Baya’s influence, claiming that she inspired his ‘Women of Algiers’ series, begun shortly after the Nationalist Uprising in 1954 – which marked the beginning of the Franco-Algerian War of Independence.
Deux Musiciennes
Breton and Picasso may have admired Baya’s ‘naïve’ style, unfettered by any formal artistic training, but this admiration was not necessarily straightforward. Critics often argue that this admiration bore an unsavoury orientalist tinge, and point out overtones of exoticism in Breton’s preface to the exhibition. Baya was a North African woman living under French colonial rule in Algeria, at a time of increasing political tension between coloniser and colonised. She was ‘discovered’ by the European artistic establishment when still an adolescent, and 50 years younger than the already celebrated Picasso.
Picasso was also fascinated by what was considered ‘primitive’ and ‘tribal’ art; the influence of African masks and the highly stylised figures present in African sculpture is evident in works from his so-called ‘African Period’ (1906-1909), including the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’.
But Baya stepped out of the shadow of reductive and orientalist viewpoints and didn’t let those of older European males hamper her work. After all, she refused to adopt the labels used to carve up and understand western art, such as surrealism and modernism; instead, she stood firm and ploughed her own distinctive furrow, painting what she saw around her and in her own dreams.
But then, almost as suddenly as she had appeared, Baya disappeared from the public eye. In 1953, she returned to Algeria and was married off to El Hadj Mahfoud Mahieddine, a well-known musician and composer almost 30 years her senior. As François Pouillon, the French scholar and expert on the Arab world, writes, “Cinderella’s surreal ball was over.” Over the course of the next ten years, Baya led the life of a traditional Muslim wife, bore six children and abandoned her paintbrushes. We should note that, while we can’t speculate on the strength of their marriage, when Mahieddine died in the mid-1970s, Baya was devastated. Even so, her marriage coincided with a creative silence. While some suggest it was her environment that prevented her from painting, others point out that the decade 1953-63 coincided with the bloody War of Independence. Baya may well have stopped painting out of solidarity with the cause.
In 1963, encouraged by Jean de Maisonseul, the Curator of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger, Baya began to paint again. Despite the hiatus in artistic production and the trauma of the war years, Baya’s distinctive style persisted. The gouaches on paper produced in her later years bear the hallmarks of a more mature artist, but they have not lost any of their hopeful exuberance. The semi-abstraction of her early paintings, the false symmetry, bold lines, and recurring motifs of women and nature, had not disappeared. This consistency, from her first work at nine years old until her death in 1998, is remarkable in that it sends out a clear message about the integrity of Baya’s own artistic and personal identity.
Baya, Femmes et orangers fond blanc, (Women and orange trees on a white background), 1947; Gouache on board 18 7⁄8 x 24 3⁄4 in. (47.9 x 62.9 cm); Collection of Isabelle Maeght, Paris © Photo Galerie Maeght, Paris
Only once in all these years did Baya align herself publicly with a group, Aouchem (‘Tattoos’ in Arabic). Aouchem’s “paramount goal”, according to Dr Cynthia Becker, Associate Professor of African Art at Boston University, “was to liberate Algerian art from the domination of colonial influences and to advocate the use of motifs and subject matter drawn from Algeria’s Berber, Arab, and Saharan African heritage”. When she put her name to Aouchem’s manifesto in 1967, Baya became the group’s only female signatory. Her alignment with Aouchem is fitting: Baya was an Algerian artist, inspired by the sun-soaked land that she called home.
Baya resisted the influence of the western canon, and rejected associations with established groups such as the surrealists. This independence of spirit and practice might explain why she has been overlooked in ‘art history’. It is likely that the strained and often violent post-colonial relationship between France and Algeria also had something to do with it. But the wonderful thing about Baya is that even after her seemingly fairy-tale stint in Paris and the strife that followed, she stayed true to her roots and to herself. As she once observed in an interview, “people tell me: ‘why [do you paint] the same thing?’ I find that if I change, I will no longer be Baya”.
