Baya Mahieddine – The charmer of Picasso and Matisse
Surrealism, for Baya, is not only an art that she practiced brilliantly. It is also her extraordinary experience that leads her to universality, to immortality.
The birth of a world artist
Baya Mahieddine | source: miilkiina.com
Born one morning in December 1931 in Borj el-Kiffan, east of Algiers, by her real name Fatma Haddad, Baya lost her parents at the age of five, but found in Marguerite Camina Benhoura, a French intellectual, a new mother. A mother who understood his artistic potential and encouraged him to exploit his talent by pursuing art studies.
Baya's beginnings
Indeed, at only 16 years old, Baya, this autodidact, was revealed by the great French gallery owner Aimé Maeght who, in the company of André Breton and through the International Exhibition of Surrealism in 1947 in Paris, knew how to highlight her works.
This is how his luminous palette, his surrealist world and his terracottas in Vallauris charmed the Parisian artistic elite, in particular Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. They then collaborated in the legendary Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris.
She inspired Picasso who, in 1955, painted "the women of Algiers" with Djamila Boupacha as an icon.
Thus, she managed to gain notoriety in France and Algeria. She exhibited in Algeria as in France, before abandoning her brushes to devote herself to her family life in the 1950s, when she married the singer El Hadj Mahieddine Mahfoud, to then resume them after the death of her husband.
His creative frenzy no longer has any brakes. She exhibited her works in 1963 at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers and participated the following year in the exhibition of Algerian painters at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. She participates in many group exhibitions in Algeria, North Africa, Europe, Cuba and Japan.
Only women in the works of Baya
No men in his works. The themes of Baya painting are found in traditional textiles, carpets, ceramics; they are fish, fruits, butterflies, birds, flowers, musical instruments, women… All drawn from its North African environment. A constancy emerges in the repetition of these forms which are constantly reinvented by the artist.
Baya died on November 9, 1998 in Blida, not without leaving behind an invaluable cultural heritage. His work was exhibited at the Gray Art Gallery in New York throughout the month of March.
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