“Surely there can’t be many forgotten female artists left to discover,” a friend of mine said recently as we were browsing this year’s autumn programmes at the European art institutions. While that feeling may occasionally creep up on us in a Western European context, all we need to do to shake it off is to look towards Marseille these days, where the first internationally oriented retrospective featuring the Algerian modernist Baya is taking place.
Baya (1931–1998, born Fatima Haddad) was not overlooked in her own time, though. In 1947, at the age of 16, she had her first solo show at the Galerie Maeght in Paris where she won immediate acclaim and recognition, particularly within the French Surrealist milieu. In France, she was known as “the Algerian Picasso,” and while this may sound like high praise indeed, it also contains elements of a rather comprehensive insult. Baya’s sudden fame supported a narrative of how the French colonisation of Algeria had borne fruit; now, even an orphaned girl from the countryside outside Algiers could step directly into the realm of modernist art, a field we still today tend to understand as a purely European and American movement, primarily carried forward by male painters.
Comprising some 150 gouache paintings and clay sculptures, the exhibition at the Centre de la Vieille Charité takes a different approach: it presents Baya through an explicitly postcolonial and feminist reading of her life and works. What we see here is a biographical exhibition of the kind that the great French institutions excel at. The show opens with a photostat showing the 16-year-old artist and proceeds to follow the development of her practice with great clarity and in perfect chronological order right up to her death in 1998.
The first few galleries are dominated by Baya’s early works, and we immediately understand why they elicited such enthusiasm on the Parisian art scene in the 1940s. Large watercolours portray women with strongly outlined, magnetic eyes, dressed in extremely ornamented traditional clothing and surrounded by birds and flowers. The pigments in gouache are neither transparent, as in watercolor, nor oil-based, which means that they have retained their bright, intense colours over the years; they look as if they were painted yesterday.
Baya was keenly interested in the oral storytelling tradition of precolonial Magrheb, and would often interpret local Berber and Arab myths. A powerful, small-scale work depicts the Kabyle fable of two orphans who are adopted by a cow, while a slightly later work, La Fontaine aux poissons (Jardin d’Eden) from 1966 depicts the Garden of Eden as it is described in Quranic verses. Another interest clearly evident in the early works is her fascination with local textiles and handicrafts – especially dresses so detailed and opulent that they almost constitute separate paintings within the painting.
From the mid-1960s, musical instruments became her favourite subject (this is probably where the comparisons to Picasso began) and her pictures are filled with oud, kwitra, rebab, and mandolins. All these instruments point to the Arab musical tradition which had been suppressed during the colonial era but saw a surge in popularity when Algeria became independent in 1962. Out of the instruments grow huge birds with plumage that seems to vibrate in time with the music, while flowering vines rhythmically wind their way around the scene, covering the paper almost entirely. The palette has become darker and deeper as Baya’s overwhelming ornamentation veers towards outright abstraction.
During this period, Baya was interested in oriental miniatures and how they play with reflections and mirroring, formal devices which set her free to disregard hierarchies, perspective, and proportions. Planes and surfaces tilt upwards to face the viewer, and a mandolin may well be the size of a mountain or the blue dome of a mosque. A succession of works features butterflies fluttering out of holes in guitars whose necks suddenly turn into peacock tails, while colourful fish jump from fountains into the pattern of a woman’s dress. Utterly terrific stuff.
Baya, une héroïne algérienne de l’Art moderneis a collaboration between Musées de Marseille and l’Institut du monde arabe in Paris, where it was shown last year. The two institutions have done a solid job of wresting Baya’s practice free from the European tradition in which she had previously been inscribed in an all-too-typical display of colonial arrogance. Throughout the exhibition, her works are juxtaposed with physical examples of traditional Algerian clothing, instruments, and handicrafts, while a large volume of letters on display shows how Baya inspired her contemporaries. Jean Debuffet (1901-1985) wrote about how the encounter with her works led him to follow new paths in his own painting, while a wall text tells how Baya and Picasso had studios side by side in Paris, ten years before Picasso painted Les Femmes d’Alger in 1955. The exhibition thus makes it probable that it was not primarily Baya who learned from the French painters. It was probably rather the North African artist who influenced European modernism.
I leave the exhibition with the impression of an artist who did not let herself be colonized by neither European modernism or the Islamic influence which dictated image bans in the years around the Algerian civil war in the 1990s. Shortly after Baya’s death, the Algerian painter Choukri Mesli (1941–2017) wrote: “For my generation, Baya symbolised hope, she represented the woman of the future, the woman of the Algeria to come. She was the first Algerian woman painter, and in my eyes, it was a victory of art over colonial darkness.”
