Baya Algerian nationality Born in Bordj el-Kiffan, Kabylia, in 1931 Dies in November 1998

Baya’s parents die when she is five years old. She starts painting and drawing as a young adolescent. When she turns sixteen in 1947, her French adoptive mother helps her in getting her watercolors exhibited at the Galerie Maeght. André Breton admires her work, and in 1949, as in a fairy tale, she meets Braque and Picasso. At the age of twenty, she marries a much older man who is a music teacher. Throughout the war, she takes care of her children. After the independence of Algeria in 1962, she has another exhibition. Baya’s husband dies in the mid 70s and she sinks into a depression.

Her drawings and paintings represent mostly women, animals, plants, sometimes villages: women wearing beautiful colored dresses covered with flowers; faces, flowers, fruits and birds spurt out like bunches of flowers. “Her paintings are constructed like windows for depth and carpets for coverings, a balance between the oriental decorating style and the occidental realism.” (Frank Maubert, Baya, catalogue, Galerie Maeght, Paris, 1998.)

All these elements blend in together as one. From their unity, forms and colors spring out into an almost abstract composition, reminding us of the works of an Aloïse or a Martha Grünenwaldt. Her colors, of course, bring up the work of Matisse. Jean Peyrissac says of her work: “For Baya, the world comes together in love: complicity and marriage between plants, animals and human beings.” (Derrière le Miroir, no.6, November 1947.)

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