At the young age of 16, the mysterious Fatma Haddad, better known by her stage name Baya, achieved recognition. She was elevated to the status of an icon by a generation of post-war French intellectuals. She is still admired by reviewers and collectors alike more than 20 years after passing away in 1998.
A complete tribute to Baya’s career, which spanned more than five decades, a new exhibition at the Institut Du Monde in Paris features a collection of her drawings, gouache paintings, and sculptures donated by Claude and France Lemand. In “Baya: Women in Their Garden,” which is on view until March 2023, many of the works of art are drawn from archives left by the artist’s adopted mother, Marguerite Caminat.
When Parisian gallery owner Aimé Maeght visited Algiers and saw Baya’s extraordinary artistic skill, Caminat was the first and biggest backer. The 16-year-old was invited by Maeght to participate in a significant show in Paris in November 1947, when her work amazed the Parisian art patrons, including André Breton, who said the following: “I speak not like so many others to lament an end, but to urge a beginning. the start of an era of harmony and liberation, in profound rupture… Baya was the reigning monarch from the beginning.”
Women became Baya’s third theme starting in 1963. “Musicians, dancers, mothers, women alone in their garden or in groups, blooming and happy, standing or sitting, surrounded by musical instruments and birds with which to converse,” she wrote.
The exhibition’s viewers will be able to appreciate both the beauty of Baya’s clay sculptures and the strength of her colorful, happy paintings.
“Baya prefers deep purple, emerald, Indian pink, and turquoise blue. She depicts the world of childhood and motherhood with an unmatched delicacy, reflecting her obsession with her mother’s memory, according to Lemand. “She first sketched in pencil before adding color. She began with the women and then moved on to other components, leaving blanks in her early works before succumbing to the Arab-Muslim aesthetic’s “horror of the void” and filling all the spaces left empty in her compositions with motifs.”
According to Lemand, there is harmony between women and all other living things in her paintings because “everyone has their own language, which is understood by all the participants on the scene.”
Baya is depicted here as the empress of a lush realm where young ladies might freely write down their dreams, which is very different from the innocent perception that some people had of her work. Baya was the “Queen of Happy Arabia,” according to Breton.