Biography
Often referred to only as Baya, the Algerian painter Baya Mahieddine was born Fatma Haddad into a poor Kabylie family in Bordj-el-Kifan, near Algiers. Orphaned at age five, Baya lived with her grandmother until she was eleven when she was ‘discovered’ by Marguerite Caminat Benhoura. Benhoura was a Frenchwoman who resided in Algiers while working as an archivist at the Muslim Bureau of Charities. Benhoura also painted, and her personal art collection included works by Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. After their meeting, Baya moved into Benhoura’s Algiers home, where she began painting, and Benhoura would often offer feedback on her efforts. Some records suggest that Baya also worked as a servant in the house.
Baya had her first exhibition in 1947, when she was 16, at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. Gallery owner Aimé Maeght (1906 –1981) organised this solo exhibition after seeing Baya’s work in Benhoura’s home. That same year, one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, André Breton (1896 –1966), exhibited Baya’s work in the Second Surrealist Exhibition. He also wrote the preface for the catalogue for the Galerie Maeght exhibition, Derrière le miroir [Behind the Mirror]. Although Baya never attended a formal art school, Benhoura’s connections in France enabled Baya to travel first to Paris and then to Vallauris, where she worked on pottery and met Pablo Picasso (1881 –1973). According to some reports, Picasso was interested in her work and recommended that she return to Algiers.
During the decade following Baya’s 1953 marriage in Blida, Algeria, and the birth of her six children, she stopped painting. Significantly, this 10-year period corresponds to Algeria’s war for independence from French colonisation, which ended in 1962. In her contribution to the 1990 exhibition of Baya, Chaibia (1929–2004), and Fahrelnissa (1901–1991) at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Franco-Algerian author Assia Djebar imagined Baya’s life and hardships during these 10 years, which Djebar calls “this forced retreat into tradition, […] this return to the abodes of women who do not go out, who give birth, who wait.” In 1963, Baya began painting again and exhibiting new and old work in Paris and Algiers.
As Ranjana Khanna has noted, Baya’s paintings focus almost exclusively on moments of encounter. Women, birds, and vegetation are frequent and recurrent motifs throughout her oeuvre. Subjects are often depicted in shallow spaces in paintings characterised by all-over patterning and rendered in bright primary colours. When asked why she chose to paint joyful scenes, Baya explained that it was due to the unhappiness in her life. In Khanna’s interpretation, painting was therapeutic for the artist, and this unhappiness —frequently overlooked in much writing about Baya— haunts her entire oeuvre.
Since her first exhibition in 1947, Baya has occupied a complex place within 20th century art history. Her early fame and popularity illuminate the overlap between French colonisation in North Africa and the European artistic avant-garde. Despite their frequently opposed political perspectives —Breton, for example, became an outspoken critic of colonialism following the 1921–1926 Rif War in Morocco and, in 1931, organised an anti-colonial exhibition in response to the “Exposition Coloniale Internationale” held that year in Paris— both groups celebrated her work as ‘naïve, primitive, and childlike.’ With its references to 1001 Nights and the artist’s purity and its linking the ‘Muslim world’ to the European Middle Ages, Breton’s 1947 text indicates the pervasive hold of Orientalist stereotypes in the early reception of self-taught artists whom Europeans claimed to have discovered in their colonies. Furthermore, these accounts fail to acknowledge any European influence, even though Baya collaborated with Marguerite Caminat Benhoura, visited and showcased her work in Paris, and pursued her studies in Vallauris.
Following Algeria’s independence, Baya was marginalised by the country’s official painting scene, which privileged social realist imagery at the time. Government documents placed her at the bottom of its hierarchy, in the group ‘painters of spontaneous popular expression,’ rather than listing her with the Aouchem (tattoo) group, with which she was, in fact, also affiliated. The Aouchem group was founded by Algerian artists Denis Martinez (1941–) and Choukri Mesli (1931–2017) and also included Mohamed Ben Baghdad (1941–2000) and Mustapha Akmoun (1946–). The group exhibited together between 1967 and 1971. Baya died in Blida, Algeria, in 1998.
