Baya

Biography

Baya was born on December 12th 1931 with Bordj el Kiffan (Extremely-in-the Eau), around Algiers.

Orphan of her two parents, it is collected by her grandmother whom it helps in her work in a farm of colonists (horticulture). In 1943 Marguerite Caminat, sister of the owner, take it at it in Algiers to render services domestic in a house whose the flowers and the birds dazzle it.

Baya then starts to model characters or fantastic clay animals and she is encouraged to carry out gouaches that the sculptor Jean Peyrissac watch with Aimé Maeght, of passage to Algiers.

An exposure, whose André Breton foreword the catalog, in 1947 is organized in Paris by Maeght in its gallery. She is a sharp success. “One extasy on the primitive spontaneousness of this art, one discovers with an amazement nonfree from paternalism, the naive expression in a rough, virgin, wild state finally”, will analyze Mohammed Khadda. The magazine Vogue publishes the photograph of Baya, which does not have whereas sixteen years, with an article of Edmonde Charles-Roux. Baya discovers Paris, meets Braque. The following year it carries out with Vallauris sculptures in Céramique with the workshop Madoura and côtoie Picasso.

But given to its tutor, it is in 1953 married traditionally, like second wife, with the musician " Arabo-Andalusian " El Hadj Mahfoud Mahieddine, of about thirty years older than it. " Passed the unreal ball of Cendrillon" , like writes it François Pouillon, Baya remains during ten years in impossibility of continuing its work.

In 1963 the Museum of Algiers acquires and exposes its old works. On the friendly incentive of Mireille and Jean de Maisonseul, conservative of the Museum, it takes again his brushes and will not cease any more realizing on paper of philosopher's stones which will be regularly exposed thereafter in Algeria, France and in the Arab world.

Several of them are preserved in the collection of rough Art of Lausanne.

Baya dies on November 9th, 1998 with Blida.

Work

In its gouaches, around the pink Indian, from blue turquoise, emeralds and purple deep, a purified feature, in margin of any solidified geometry, comes to determine without hesitation nor repentance the silhouettes and the caps of “High Ladies”, figures of the enigmatic Mother, the reasons which recover their dresses, belts and scarves. In compositions which do not cease exploiting false symmetries, the image is closed again rigorously, through the balance of spaces and of let us tons, the dialog without end of the arabesques, on an autonomous space, resolutely unrealized. Baya builds a closed universe, exclusively female, all at the same time recluse and sovereign.

The objects which surround these “Ladies” detach, without null shade, laid out the ones above the others on the various registers a single plan in a vision which refuses any prospect illusionist. As of the first gouaches of Baya appear vases and jugs, bouquets and fruits. Two decades later fruit dishes and cuts, beyond water melons and grapes, overflow of a multitude of fruits and indistinct fish. Posed on tables or racks, lamps and lanterns accompany them, and of many musical instruments, viols and violins, cythares and mandores, lutes, quadrants and toothing-stone.

When its gouaches venture out of the intimacy of the interiors, emergent of the islands, encircled fish, populated tight huts ones against the others and of trees where take care of many birds. The exubérance of the form and the intensity of the color make there go up, noted the novelist Jean Pélégri “at a time former to the appearance of the man, where the things and the creatures were still dubious and still frays, where the trees pushed under water, where the fish, before arriving in their state, lived the roots of the plants and went up in their stems”.

Judgments

“I speak, not like so many others to deplore an end but to promote a beginning and on this beginning Baya is queen. The beginning of an age of emancipation and harmony, in radical rupture with the precedent and of which one of the principal levers is for the man the systematic impregnation, increasingly larger, of nature. (...) Baya whose mission is to reload direction these beautiful words nostalgic: “happy Arabia”. Baya, which holds and revives the branch of gold . ”

André Breton, in Baya , Behind the Mirror , Maeght Gallery, Paris, November 1947

“Baya is the sister of Schéhérazade. Schéhérazade, the tisserande of the words which move away death. Schéhérazade, this other woman who confabulates to compensate for her reclusion. Us here thus in the tale, with its marvellous universe (title of a work of 1968). Baya repeals the forms, classifications and dimensions: the bird stretches itself and becomes snake, trees and shacks push guingois, the vases ramify, become arborescent like tails or the crested ones of birds. In this kind of village of the origins where boxes, trees and birds are gotten mixed up, the landscapes and objects bathe in the unformulated one and the freedom of the placental world. No center of gravity is allowed. All the effort of the artist is tended towards the search for a kind of antenatal harmony that the discovery of the normalized world, marked out, angular made us lose”.

Tahar Djaout, Schéhérazade with the birds , in Algeria-Topicality n°1146, Algiers, 1st -7 October 1987

Selective bibliography

Baya , Behind the Mirror , Maeght Gallery, Paris, November 1947.
Baya , foreword of Gaston Defferre, text of Jean de Maisonseul, Cantini Museum, Marseilles, 1982.
Algeria, multiple Expressions (Baya, Me hamed Issiakhem, Mohammed Khadda) , foreword of Henri Marchal, foreword of Kateb Yacine, texts of Jean Pélégri, Jean de Maisonseul, Benamar Mediene and Michel-Georges Bernard, Books of the ADEIAO n°5, Paris, 1987.
Baya , Bouchêne Editions, Algiers, 1988.
Three women painters, Baya, Chaïbia, Fahrelnissa , Institute of the Arab World, Paris, 1992.
effects of the voyage, 25 Algerian artists , (texts of Fatma Zohra Zamoum, Ramon Tio Bellido, Michel-Georges Bernard and Malika Dorbani Bouabdellah), Palate of the Congresses and the Culture, Mans, December 1995.
Baya among us , discussion with Baya by Dalila Morsly, texts of André Breton, Jean de Maisonseul, Ali Silem, Hassen Bouabdellah, Jean Pélégri, Djilali Kadid, Lucette Albaret, in Algeria Literature/Action n° 15-16, Marsa editions, Paris, 1997.
Painters of the Sign - Mesli, Martinez, Baya, Khadda, Koraïchi, Samta Ben Yahia, Silem, Sergoua, Mohand, Yahiaoui, Tibouchi , texts of Pierre Gaudibert, Nourredine Saadi, Michel-Georges Bernard and Nicole de Pontcharra), Festival of Humanity, Courneuve, September 1998 (road show).
Baya , texts of André Breton, Frank Maubert and Jean Peyrissac, Maeght editor, Paris, 1998.
Baya , texts of Lucette Albaret, Michel-Georges Bernard and François Pouillon, Books of the ADEIAO n° 16, Paris, 2000.
Jean Sénac, Faces of Algeria, Glances on art , Paris, the Paris-Mediterranean/Algiers, EDIF 2000,2000.
Baya , foreword of Michele Moutashar, texts of Edmonde Charles-Roux, Michel-Georges Bernard, Lucette Albaret, Museum Réattu, Arles, 2003.

Internal bond

contemporary Algerian Painting

External bonds

Baya with the Museum of the Art schools of Algiers, 2007 (many images)
Photographs of the site of the Meeting of the National museums
Baya in the collections of rough Art, Lausanne
Article on Baya (5 images)

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