Algerian artist ‘Baya was a secret I didn't want to force’, says author Alice Kaplan

Paris, 21 November 1947, the young Baya Mahieddine exhibited her paintings in Paris. In front of Aime Maeght’s gallery. Painters Braque and Andre Marchand, writers Albert Camus, Andre Breton and Francois Mauriac, came to observe the brightly pigmented paintings of a 16-year-old Algerian girl.

Alice Kaplan’s writing, which traces with almost obsessive meticulousness the evening when Baya exhibited, capturing both this young girl and the atmosphere of post-war France and the beginnings of a war to come.

Paris was slowly emerging from the shadows of the Second World War, and this young native girl was in the spotlight. In a France that was about to enter the throes of the wars of decolonisation, starting with that of the Algerian jewel in its colonial crown, the young girl was hailed as a raw, innate talent. Of course, the French overseas territory had already risen up, notably on 8 May 1945, when Algerians demonstrated in Guelma, Setif and Kherrata. France, celebrating the surrender of Germany and the end of the Nazi yoke, put a bloody end to these demonstrations of freedom.

In the background of this vernissage, the massacres and Algeria’s boiling independence movement loom large.

A tutelary and ambivalent figure

“Baya ou le grand vernissage” is not a traditional biography. “You can’t know everything about a life, especially Baya’s, who kept to herself. So I worked in concentric circles around her. The idea was to get close to Baya in this way,” Kaplan explains.

Of course, as in any biography, we learn a few details of the artist’s life. A few elements that situate her in historical linearity. Baya, whose real name was Fatma Haddad, was born in 1931 in Bordj El-Kiffan, an eastern suburb of Algiers, and died in 1998 in Blida. We learn only that she married musician El Hadj Mahfoud Mahieddine in 1953.

This arranged marriage made her the second wife of an older man, with whom she had six children. During the war years, she stopped painting and only resumed painting in 1962, with the help of Jean de Maisonseul, the new director of the Musee National des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, who exhibited her work from 1963.

Baya is her moniker, chosen as a tribute to a mother who died very young. The only gentle figure in a miserable childhood, between an uncle who beat her and a grandmother who took her in and beat her just as badly. In this ocean of misery, the guardian figure of Marguerite Caminat appears, a French woman married to Franck Mac Ewen, a Scottish Jewish painter. The couple had fled France, invaded by the German army, and settled in Algiers at the end of 1940. Marguerite spotted Baya’s singular “insane talent”, guided her, adopted her in a way, and provided her with the materials she needed to express her art.

“Marguerite was a foreigner lost in the colonies, in the words of Algerian writer Assia Djebar. Her husband was a nephew of Pissarro. Baya met her at the age of 11. Baya was employed on Marguerite’s sister’s horticultural farm,” Kaplan explains.

But Marguerite also appears as an ambivalent figure, protective but not emancipatory. Kaplan questions this ambiguous solicitude head-on, noting that “Baya entered the world of progressive Europeans as a maid, those whom Albert Memmi bitterly called ‘colonisers of good will’, but with a margin of freedom.” They encouraged her to paint and shape clay, once her chores were done.

It is necessary, Kaplan adds, to approach Baya through the eyes of Marguerite, who left numerous archives. But then, it is necessary to strip ourselves of this same view of Baya, as “the archive is not the answer; it remains the question. I realised that I was trapped in Marguerite’s vision.”

Marguerite thus seems to treat Baya as an adopted daughter, and Kaplan attempts to understand the bond between the young native and the European. “It’s as much a book about Marguerite as it is about Baya,” she says. Marguerite was childless and “takes Baya in and ends up abandoning her. She renounces her guardianship after she marries a Muslim Algerian. Baya was sent to Blida to a very pious family, where a marriage was arranged.”

Indigenous art

But if Marguerite recognised her talent, was she able to overcome the prejudices of the time about so-called indigenous art, a spontaneous art requiring no apprenticeship, refinement or training? Why didn’t she and her husband push her to improve her technique?

For Kaplan, the explanation lies in the fact that “in the post-war period, there was a fascination with children’s genius, their innate talent. It was post-war, children were life again.”

Marguerite was careful to keep her raw talent as it was. She discovered a talent that she felt was innate, but which she was careful not to explore further, lest it be distorted.

Despite this, Baya’s painting captivates with its mastery, its vivid, thick, flat colours. The combination of colours is both delicate and assertive. Above all, Baya was an outstanding colourist who seemed to have drawn on a variety of sources: Kabyle art with its distinctive motifs, Orientalist paintings with their reclining odalisques, Japanese prints too, with women’s eyes stretched out and hair as if lacquered in black. Floral draperies à la Klimt also unfold on the canvases of the petite Algerian. Maternal allegories, mother and child, populate her paintings, like the illustration of the pain of a motherless orphan.

In this sometimes dreamlike pictorial universe, populated by chimeras as if out of fairy tales and fantastical lands, the French surrealists saw the art evident, the art indigene, the innate art. Art that has not been transformed by Western rationality. Andre Breton raved about Baya’s canvases, just as he had celebrated those of Frida Kahlo. But if the Mexican had ferociously mocked the flights of fancy of the father of Surrealism, Baya opposed him with her silence.

Kaplan also refuses to see Baya’s paintings as “childish art”. “I see her as miraculously sophisticated,” Kaplan tells MEMO, pointing out that, alas, commentators will fail to convey the full extent of her talent. “Every time, they play her down, saying that she doesn’t know what she’s painting, that she’s going to lose it, that she has a savage art that Westerners have lost through civilisation.”

Baya refuses to theorise about her art, refusing to answer questions with her stubborn silence. And therein lies Baya’s fragile strength, crushed as she was by a conglomeration of cliches and preconceived ideas about these “primitive arts” in a Europe that was trying to rediscover, in the myth of intact childhood, a revival of life and innocence.

The Algerian war

Through Baya, the Parisian intelligentsia of the time also seemed to welcome an allegory of colonial Algeria. A wild, mute young girl, mute in her determination. The perception of Baya’s art will not escape the political question. For while the political counter-field of an Algeria in the early days of independence is not the primary focus of her book, the Algerian question looms large in Alice Kaplan’s work.

In the France of Vincent Auriol, independence demands were frightening. The aim was both to stifle them and to ensure a little autonomy for French Algeria, notably through a loyal indigenous elite. Baya, allegorised as a childish, mute Algeria, represents these French political desires. This is how we should understand the message from gallery owner Aime Maeght to Michelle Auriol, wife of French President Vincent Auriol: “The Muslim community attaches great importance to this event, which it regards as a cultural embassy. She wrote that ‘the mark shown to the little orphan Baya gives us a right to the recognition of the whole of Muslim Algeria’.”

She’s a little “Kabyle” dressed in heavy traditional Algerian costumes, as if to emphasise that she’s also the representative of her country. 21 November 1947, the date of her exhibition, was as much an artistic event as a political one. “When Camus says that she was like “a princess among barbarians”, he’s talking about Baya’s dignity, but he’s also saying that she too was like an exhibition. She was dressed in so-called Algerian costume. She had to be disguised according to a French fantasy of the Algerian woman,” Kaplan explains.

Like a projection of the colonial unconscious, she was a childlike, mute person, whose primary talent is only worthwhile if it is discovered and enhanced by the European gaze. In a particularly misleading article, Baya is presented as the granddaughter of a witch and the daughter of a “public woman”. It’s as if only the help of a European could have saved her from a destiny that had already been drawn up.

Beneath her heavy Algerian costumes, she is a “bride of Franco-Algerian reconciliation”.

“She is caught up in a story that goes beyond her. She is the pretext for an impossible reconciliation. She was asked to represent all the little Algerian girls, and told that she had to behave herself, with costumes. Perhaps her silence was a form of resistance,” Kaplan says.

The silence of a child

Baya is a silent canvas. To all intrusive questions, she offers a laconic, clear-cut “I don’t know”. It is, however, unclear if her silence is a conscious refusal of the role we want her to play, or the withdrawal of a fearful, tired child.

Kaplan respects this silence over the years. She never lends Baya words or thoughts she didn’t have. Everything in the American academic’s book is meticulously sourced. Letters, archives and witnesses give her the opportunity to grasp a little of Baya, without ever forcing her subject. Alice Kaplan even seems to make Baya’s voluntary withdrawal her own. In areas she doesn’t know, the author remains silent. No interpretation, no suggestion, no projection. Through the decades, Kaplan respects the modesty and savagery of an Algerian teenager. “Everyone speaks for her, even in the letters she sent to her godmother,” Kaplan recalls.

The author takes full responsibility for these deliberate ellipses, warning the reader from the outset that she does not intend to engage in cultural projection or appropriation by lending Baya any words or thoughts. In addition to an all-American prudence in the face of the proliferation of post-colonial debates.

“It’s a very lively debate in the United States, and one we can’t ignore. Orientalism comes very easily. But at the same time, I can’t not write about Baya because I’m American. But I refused to work on her work with my expertise as a historian. But I was able to approach her through her place in history,” Kaplan explains the delicacy of her work.

The reader seems to remain on Baya’s doorstep, without really moving into her psyche, or even her life. But the silence in no way provides a void. Rather, it’s a question that remains unanswered. It’s a delicacy.

“I don’t know what life is like for a Muslim woman, the second wife of an older man. Baya was always secretive, dignified and discreet. When questioned, she always replied ‘I don’t know’, an answer that struck Francois Mauriac. Baya remained secretive, and I didn’t want to force that secrecy,” Kaplan says of her work.

While Baya is part of Algerian heritage, she is not included in the history curriculum. Worse still, Baya’s most beautiful paintings are exhibited not in a dedicated room at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Algiers, but above the shelves of the institution’s library. In this national museum, you have to look up to see the beauties born of the spirit of this silent Algerian.

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