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4.5
Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris (Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Collection)
ByPublisher Description
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 in 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 the young girl 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.”
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 in 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 the young girl 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.”
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesSeeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris (Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Collection) Reviews
4.5
“Seeing Baya is a book about Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine and her early life. I knew nothing about Baya or her art before picking up this book, despite her rubbing shoulders with artists like Matisse and Picasso.
Her life, like many servant girls in colonies, is marred by tragedy early on. Orphaned and made to work at a young age she eventually gets taken in by a couple who sees her creative spark and her talent. Much of the story is told through the lens of her "adoptive" mother, Marguerite Caminat-McEwen-Benhoura, and focuses on the years she lived with Marguerite. Baya's story is limited by the sources and it is hard to separate fact from myth. Her life story stops in its tracks once she gets married and her return to painting isn't a big focus. It is mainly her life as a child artist.
The political backdrop is the focus of one chapter but I would have found it interesting to see even more of this. She lived through the Algerian war and Algerian independence but we do not see much about how this may have affected her life personally or as an artist.
The story is well-presented and interesting, allowing us a glimpse into the life of an artist whose art has to speak for her as there are so few sources of her speaking for herself. There are many events in her life where we will never know how she felt or if she was happy, but Kaplan does a good job of presenting Baya in context of those who knew and loved her.”
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