Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris

The first biography of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, celebrated in mid-twentieth-century Paris, her life shrouded in myth.   On a flower farm in colonial Algeria, a servant and field worker named Baya escaped the drudgery of her labor by coloring the skirts in fashion magazines. Three years later, in November 1947, her paintings and fanciful clay beasts were featured in a one-woman show at the Maeght Gallery in Paris.

She wasn’t yet sixteen years old.  Alice Kaplan tells the story of a young woman seemingly trapped in subsistence who becomes a sensation of the French capital, then mysteriously fades from the history of modern art—only to reemerge after independence as an icon of Algerian artistic heritage.   The toast of Paris for the 1947 season, Baya inspired colonialist fantasies about her “primitive genius” as well as genuine appreciation. She was featured in newspapers, radio, and a newsreel; her art was praised by Breton and Camus, Matisse and Braque.  At the dawn of Algerian liberation, her appearance in Paris was used to stage the illusion of French-Algerian friendship, while horrific French massacres in Algeria were still fresh in memory.  Kaplan uncovers the central figures in Baya’s life and the role they played in her artistic career.  Among the most poignant was Marguerite Caminat-McEwen-Benhoura, who took Baya from her sister’s farm to Algiers to work as her maid and gave her paint and brushes.

A complex and endearing character, Marguerite’s Pygmalion ambitions were decisive in determining Baya’s destiny.  Kaplan also looks closely at Baya’s earliest paintings with an eye to their themes, their palette and design, and their enduring influence. In vivid prose that brings Baya’s story into the present, Kaplan’s book, the fruit of scrupulous research in Algiers, Blida, Paris, and Provence, allows us to see in a whole new light the beloved artist who signed her paintings simply “Baya.”