Baya (painter)

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Baya , actually Fatma Haddad , married Mahieddine (born December 12, 1931 in Bordj el Kiffan , Fort de l'Eau near Algiers ; † November 9, 1998 in Blida , Algeria ), was an Algerian painter who basically only worked with her Common first names signed. She was one of the early representatives of the Art Brut .

biography

The orphaned Baya was raised by her grandmother, who helped her with gardening in a colonist post. In 1943 she took Margerite Caminat, the owner's sister, to her house in Algiers, where she had to work in the household and she was fascinated by the abundance of flowers and birds.

There she began to sculpt figures and mythical animals out of clay and was encouraged to create gouaches, which were shown by the sculptor Jean Peyrissac Aimé Maeght , who was temporarily in Algiers . He organized an exhibition in his gallery in 1947. André Breton wrote the foreword to the catalog . The exhibition was a success.

The photo of the only 16-year-old Baya appeared in an article by Edmonde Charles-Roux in Vogue magazine . The young girl discovered Paris, met the painter Georges Braque and in the following year realized sculptures and ceramics in the Madoura studio in Vallauris . It was there that she met Picasso .

In 1953, Baya was returned to her guardian, who, as the second wife, married the Arab-Andalusian musician El Hadj Mahfoud Mahieddine, who was about 30 years her senior. " After the ireal Achenputtelball " as François Pouillon wrote, Baya was unable to continue her work for ten years.

In 1963, the Musée national des beaux-arts d'Alger acquired and exhibited her older works. Encouraged by the museum curators Mireille and Jean de Maisonseul , she began to paint again and realized large-format works on paper, which were later regularly used in Algeria (Alger, Tizi Ouzou , Annaba ), in France (Paris and Marseille ), in Belgium ( Brussels ) and were exhibited in the Arab world . Several of them were included in the “Collection de l'art brut” in Lausanne .

Baya belongs, together with Mohamed Aksouh , Abdallah Benanteur , Abdelkader Guermaz , M'hamed Issiakhem , Mohammed Khadda or Choukri Mesli , to the artists of the "generation of 1930" (all these artists were born during this time) who, after their predecessors of Twenties, which became the founders of contemporary Algerian art.

plant

In her gouaches, dominated by pink, turquoise blue, emerald green and violet hues, a simple line, applied with a sure hand and without any improvement, outlines the silhouettes and the headgear of the "high ladies", their dresses, belts and veils as well as the figures of the enigmatic mother . In compositions that never cease to play with false symmetries , the balance of the spaces and the tones, the endless dialogue of the arabesques , is reflected in an autonomous space that is unreal. Baya designs a closed, exclusively female world that is both withdrawn and sovereign.

The objects surrounding these ladies lack any shadow. You are placed one behind the other with a clear rejection of an illusionistic perspective. Vases , jugs , bouquets of flowers and fruits appear in the first gouaches , two decades later bowls and goblets , watermelons, grapes and many other fruits and fish appear. These are accompanied by shelves and tables with lamps and lanterns and numerous musical instruments such as violas , violins , zithers , mandolins , lutes , lyres and harps .

When the artist is looking for her motifs outside of the home, she paints islands surrounded by fish with huts built close to one another and with trees in which birds watch. The opulence of the forms and the intensity of the colors are reminiscent, as the novelist Jean Pélégri put it, "of a time before the appearance of man, when things and creatures were still uncertain and mixed, when the trees grew under the water and the fish before they reached their later state, living in the roots of plants and climbing their stems " .

Assessments

“I speak, not like so many others to lament an end, but to encourage a beginning. And at this beginning, Baya is queen. The beginning of an age of emancipation and harmony, a radical break with the previous one and one of the main levers for man, the systematic saturation, still something bigger, nature (...) Baya, whose mission is to find the meaning of this beautiful old one To revive words: happy Arabia. Baya holding the laurel branch and carrying it on. "

“Baya is the sister of Schéhérazade, the weaver of the words that keep death away. Schéhérazade, that other woman who talks to avoid the death penalty. So we are in a fairy tale with its wonderful worlds. Baya dissolves the forms, the classifications and dimensions: the bird stretches and becomes a snake, trees and huts grow crooked, the mud branch out, become like tree-like tails or the hoods of birds. In their villages the origins of fields, trees and birds are interwoven, landscapes and objects bathe in the unspoken and in the obsession of a placental world. Any focus cannot be seen. The entire effort of the artist is directed towards the search for a kind of prenatal harmony which the uncovered, standardized world has withdrawn from us. "

literature

  • Baya , Derrière le Miroir , Galerie Maeght, Paris, November 1947.
  • Jean de Maisonseul (text), Gaston Defferre (foreword): Baya , Musée Cantini, Marseille , 1982.
  • Jean Pélégri, Jean de Maisonseul, Benamar Mediene and Michel-Georges Bernard (text), Henri Marchal, Kateb Yacine (foreword): Algérie, Expressions multiples (Baya, M'hamed Issiakhem, Mohammed Khadda) , Cahiers de l'ADEIAO n ° 5, Paris, 1987 ISBN 2-906267-04-X .
  • Baya , Editions Bouchêne, Alger, 1988.
  • Trois femmes peintres, Baya, Chaïbia, Fahrelnissa , Institut du monde arabe , Paris, 1992. ISBN 2-906062-31-6
  • Fatma Zohra Zamoum, Ramon Tio Bellido, Michel-Georges Bernard, Malika Dorbani Bouabdellah: Les effets du voyage, 25 artistes algériens , Palais des Congrès et de la Culture, Le Mans , December 1995 ISBN 2-9509698-0-1 .
  • Baya parmi nous , conversation with Baya by Dalila Morsly, texts André Breton, Jean de Maisonseul, Ali Silem, Hassen Bouabdellah, Jean Pélégri, Djilali Kadid, Lucette Albaret, in Algérie Littérature / Action n ° 15-16, Marsa éditions, Paris, 1997.
  • Pierre Gaudibert, Nourredine Saadi, Michel-Georges Bernard and Nicole de Pontcharra: Peintres du Signe - Mesli, Martinez , Baya, Khadda, Koraïchi, Samta Ben Yahia, Silem , Sergoua, Mohand , Yahiaoui , Tibouchi , Fête de l'Humanité , La Courneuve , September 1998 (traveling exhibition).
  • André Breton, Frank Maubert and Jean Peyrissac: Baya , Maeght éditeur, Paris, 1998. ISBN 2-86941-291-6
  • Lucette Albaret, Michel-George Bernard and François Pouillon: Baya , Cahiers de l'ADEIAO n ° 16, Paris, 2000 ISBN 2-906267-16-3 .
  • Jean Sénac: Visages d'Algérie, Regards sur l'art , Paris, Paris-Méditerranée / Alger, EDIF 2000, 2000 ISBN 2-84272-156-X .
  • Michèle Moutashar (foreword), Edmonde Charles-Roux, Michel-Georges Bernard, Lucette Albaret: Baya , Musée Réattu , Arles , 2003.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ " On s'extasie sur la spontanéité" primitive de cet art, on découvre avec un Emerveillement non exempt de paternalisme, l'expression naïve à l'état brut, vierge, sauvage enfin "(Mohammed Khadda)
  2. ↑ Freely translated from the French. Original text: "(...) à un temps antérieur à l'apparition de l'homme où les choses et les creatures étaient encore incertaines et encore mêlées, où les arbres poussaient sous les eaux, où les poissons, avant de parvenir à leur état, habitaient les racines des plantes et montaient dans leurs tiges " . (Jean Pélégri)
  3. ^ André Breton on Baya in: Derrière le Miroir, Paris: Galerie Maeght, November 1947
  4. ↑ Tahar Djaout: Schéhérazade aux oiseaux in: Algérie-Actualité n ° 1146, Alger, 1er -7 octobre 1987th
personal data
SURNAME Baya
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Haddad, Fatma; Mahieddine, Fatma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Algerian painter and ceramist of Art Brut
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Bordj el Kiffan
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 1998
Place of death Blida