Where does the genius of this painter come from, who fascinated the art world from the age of 16? Why did Fatma Haddad, known as Baya, born in 1931, manage to condense Arab culture in the colors and shapes of her magical and flamboyant paintings? What role does Algeria play in the misunderstanding of his work? A very large exhibition to salute at the Institute of the Arab World (IMA) in Paris.
The largest retrospective ever undertaken on the Algerian artist Baya (1931-1998) is above all the work of Claude Lemand. Born in Lebanon, from a modest family, this son of a taxi driver left his country after suffering during the civil war. Then, this teacher-researcher in comparative literature in Beirut lived several lives: professor in Khartoum, Cairo and France, founder in Paris of a gallery specializing in the works of Arab artists, collector, he did in 2018, with his wife France, a very important donation to the Arab World Institute (IMA): 1,500 works by contemporary artists, including 600 works by Algerian artists. Today, he is co-curator of the exhibition Baya.
RFI : Why Baya, born December 12, 1931 in Fort-de-l’Eau (Bordj el Kiffan), near Algiers, and died November 9, 1998 in Blida, is she the most singular Algerian artist of the 20th century ?
Claude Lemond : I would even say much more than that. During our research, we realized that Baya was an artist who was able to sum up millennia of culture and art from the Arab world. Her culture is totally oral, popular, and until the age of twelve she had no contact with Europeans. She lost her father at the age of 6, and her mother at 9. But, she remained very attentive and attentive to the tales that the old men and women told her. She was from a very poor background in deep Algeria, both from Kabylie and around Algiers.
She has no schooling, where does her artistic conscience come from? ?
This is the legacy of Algerian women, especially in Kabyle villages, from a time when the Sahara was not a desert. There were populations with animals, trees, all over southern Algeria. These men and women artists have decorated kilometers and kilometers of rocks called “tassili n’Ajjer”, it is really an immense place of decorated mountains. This culture has risen over the millennia to the regions of the Algerian desert. There developed the language of magic drawing. There are still shamans, Bedouins from the desert, who transmit the science of drawing on the sand. A highly developed design with both earthly and heavenly meanings. In certain villages of Kabylie, women, each year, entirely repaint their house inside and outside. From generation to generation, they transmitted colors, shapes, meanings, symbols, ceremonies where there was singing, music… Baya, we don’t know how, absorbed all that. And she transfigured it into an exceptionally beautiful and universal art.
It is not – as Jean Dubuffet said – art brut. It is not naive art. It is her own art, both so personal and universal. Baya is both an Algerian and universal icon.
Among his iconic paintings, why do you particularly appreciate mother and child in blue from 1947 ?
Look at the mastery she demonstrates in this painting. She was 15, 16 years old. It shows a maternity that is worth the great maternity of the Italian Renaissance. But that is her motherhood, with this woman, her mother, her gaze on her child, and the gaze of the child. There is a loving relationship between mother and child. On the lady’s shoulder rests a bird, decorated in exactly the same colors and shapes as this child. On the painting, the bird speaks to her, she understands him and she speaks to him. It is a fantastic bird of her own paradise.
When did Fatma Haddad become Baya ?
Historian Anissa Bouayed [une des trois co-commissaires aux côtés de Djamila Chakour et Claude Lemand] analyzed day after day, year after year, the life of Baya, especially since her meeting with Marguerite Caminat in 1942 in this horticultural farm where Baya’s grandmother worked as an agricultural worker. At the time, the child was 11 years old, but already in her all the richness of this culture and this millennial art. She drew calmly and quietly on the sand, like the shamans of the desert. She took water with earth to make sculptures.
Baya’s mother was called Bahia, “the resplendent”, but the usual name given to her was Baya. When her mother died, Fatma Haddad was 9 years old. And when Marguerite Caminat met her, her name was already Baya. This is the artist name she chose for herself.
From the beginning, she installs themes to which she remains faithful until her last paintings. : women, animals, later music. Was she aware of being a kind of medium of Algerian myths or was there also a part of obsession in her works? ?
Baya has never had an identity problem. She knew she was an artist. She said : ” I was born an artist. God gave me this gift. She assimilated all this Algerian culture and made it into a universal art, an art of peace. In the first period, there are only women. She said it herself: I lost my mother when I was little. And all the women you see in my paintings are portraits I do of my mother. I miss her so much. In addition, there were birds, plants, flowers… symbolic elements of Algeria: the olive tree, the date palms. On the other hand, in 1953, she married a great musician, El Hadj Mahfoud Mahieddine. For ten years, she will take care of the education of her children. She who had not had the happiness of being educated all her childhood by a mother, she was a marvelous mother. During that time, she did not make any paintings or sculptures.
Thanks to which work, thanks to which exhibition, did she become famous ?
In 1947, when she was 16, her first personal exhibition took place, at the Maeght gallery in Paris. She was wildly successful, both commercially and in the media. Artists, the most famous writers, journalists of all persuasions, she had impressed everyone. Albert Camus said: She’s the princess among the barbarians “. She had a very high notoriety from 1947, even during all this colonial era, despite the fact that French colonial Algeria had not recognized her at all.
After independence in 1962, how was its reception in Algeria ?
Baya was a genius in painting, she could also have been a genius in sculpture. But Algeria did nothing for her. Where to find a workshop? Where to find an oven? [Sa « mère adoptive »] Marguerite Caminat took the sculptures that had been exhibited at the Maeght gallery in 1947, and she baked them at the neighborhood bakery! Hence their fragility.
From the end of 1961, and the announcement of a possible peace signing, Baya started painting again, and it was a fantastic rebirth. She no longer made small works, but large formats. His women are always beautiful, young, radiant. She continued to paint birds, nature, and she invented two other themes: the landscape and the living still lifes of which we show here some masterpieces.
Today, there are no works by Baya in the collections of the Center Pompidou in Paris, nor at the Tate Modern in London, nor at MoMA in New York. Is this professional misconduct or how do you explain this ?
I explain this in two ways. Algeria, after independence, did nothing for Baya. Algerian governments have considered all Algerian artists and writers to be the property of the Algerian revolution. They have never promoted Baya, or any great Algerian artist of his generation, internationally. And it is internationally that the coast of artists is made. At the Venice Biennale in 1964, the Americans decided [avec le succès du pop-art incarné par le lauréat Robert Rauschenberg, NDLR] that the greatest contemporary artists in the world are the Americans and that it is from them that one must buy works. They have installed such a powerful distribution policy that an American artist of the same generation as Soulages is not worth a million like Soulages, but ten or a hundred million. And an artist like Baya is not worth a million like Soulages, but ten or maybe twenty or thirty thousand euros. Financially, Baya has only begun to be recognized for two years.
This exhibition brings together very large works by Baya lent by the Arab World Institute, the museums of Marseille, by your Claude and France Delmand Fund. What role have museums, collections and collectors played in Algeria? What was their participation, how did you interact with them ?
For this exhibition, we have not borrowed any work, any document from Algeria. The situation there is too complicated. Go make a request to the Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers to send us even a photo of a painting, you can wait five, ten or twenty years! And let’s not talk about lending us works. Now, the will exists among the organizers to call for later, for the exhibition that we are going to do at the Vieille Charité in Marseilles where they have more room. It is the city of Marseilles which will ask Baya’s family to try to bring works.
In 1982, the Cantini museum in Marseille organized a major exhibition of Baya and the artist came from Algiers. President Mitterrand, ministers Jack Lang and Gaston Defferre, writer Edmonde Charles-Roux [amie de Baya] were there to welcome him. From this great historical moment, Baya began to be recognized in France. But the problem in France is that visitors to exhibitions are limited to Algerians and friends or connoisseurs of Algeria. We, what we want with this exhibition and the great book that accompanies the exhibition, is that it goes beyond borders.
The exhibition majestically demonstrates that Baya did not need to be influenced by a Picasso or an André Breton to express his genius, which was there from an early age. Conversely, what did you discover about the influence of Baya’s painting on other artists of his generation? ?
Baya was not influenced by any of France’s modern artists. Yes, in the summer of 1948, at the Madoura studio in Vallauris, she met Picasso, who was working the clay next door in another studio. They had a very good relationship, but the nasty tongues said that it was Picasso who took her by the hand and taught her the art of clay, when Picasso had no knowledge of the work of the clay. But there is also the opposite thesis, put forward by certain American extremist feminists to please Algerian nationalists and Arab nationalists. I quote the sentence of an American exhibition curator: Baya influenced Picasso, Matisse and all the modern male artists of Paris. This is the absurdity of transforming things. Baya didn’t influence any of those personalities, but she wasn’t influenced either. Braque received her in his studio three or four times, but that does not mean that she copied Braque or that Braque copied her.
►Baya, icon of Algerian paintingexhibition presented from November 8, 2022 to March 26, 2023 at the IMA, in Paris, and then, from May 11, 2023 to September 23, 2023 at the Center de la Vieille Charité in Marseille.