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88 - BAYA (Fatma Haddad Mahieddine(Algeria, Bordj el Kiffan 1931 …
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Estimate €30,000 - €50,000
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Description
BAYA (Fatma Haddad Mahieddine(Algeria, Bordj el Kiffan 1931 - Blida 1998) Untitled, known as Woman with mauve hat, circa 1945 Gouache on paper pasted on cardboard 41.5 x 55.5 cm on view Unsigned. Condition: restoration to the upper part. *** Gouache on paper laid on card, unsigned (sight: 16⅜ × 21⅞ in.) This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Comité Baya Provenance : By descent, Rosita Wertheimer collection (1891-1949), who hosted Baya at her first exhibition at André Maeght in Paris in 1947. Bibliography: Reproduced in Alice Kaplan, Baya ou le grand vernissage, ed. Le Bruit du monde, 2024, p. 150 and on the cover. This gouache on paper, executed around 1945, is one of Baya's earliest and most accomplished early works - the artist was only fifteen years old at the time. Alice Kaplan gives the most precise description in her survey Baya ou le grand vernissage (Le Bruit du monde, 2024), for which the work illustrates the cover: "a European woman's face, half-moon eyes and doll's lips, a purple hat with fringes the size of a lampshade. To the left, a bird stares at the woman and child with flowing black hair, a happy odalisque whose blue-striped dress resembles a sleeping bag [...]. Around them, a frothy blue wash evokes a wave or a river, and on the right, a stylised bush in several colours, the same motif that Baya used to decorate the margins of the letters she sent Marguerite in 1947. The provenance of the work lies at the heart of the founding event of Baya's career. Baya first worked on the Farges farm in Fort-de-l'Eau, near Algiers, before being taken in by Marguerite Caminat - sister of Simone Farges - who discovered her talent and became her guardian. It was here that Marcel Wertheimer, Rosita's son and a student at the Agricultural Institute of Algeria convalescing at the Farges farm after losing a leg during a military manoeuvre in 1942, met Baya. An amateur photographer, he photographed her in the summer of 1946, according to Marguerite's notes. Femme avec chapeau mauve (Woman with a mauve hat) was given to him by Baya in Algiers around the same period; the painting remained with him, and has remained in the family to this day. This Algiers connection preceded and shed light on Baya's Parisian sojourn in November 1947, when she was in Paris for her first exhibition at the Galerie Maeght - an opening attended by André Breton, Georges Braque and Albert Camus. She stayed on boulevard Victor-Hugo, in Neuilly, at the home of Rosita Wertheimer, Marcel's mother, who took her in as part of a network of hospitality that had been built up since Algeria: it was Simone and Henri Farges who put Marguerite in touch with Mrs Wertheimer, who agreed to take in the young artist in Neuilly. This stay, which is abundantly documented in Marguerite Caminat's archives, reveals that Rosita Wertheimer, who was reserved at first, quickly became attentive to the young artist's well-being and expressed sincere admiration for a talent that she perceived as exceptional and enduring. It was precisely in this context that Cadi Benhoura entrusted Baya to Albert Camus in a letter dated 7 November 1947 - asking him to "look after her to protect her from any manoeuvres" - and that Camus replied in terms that have remained famous: "I have greatly admired the kind of miracle to which each of her works bears witness. In this black and frightened Paris, it is a joy for the eyes and the heart [...]: it was the princess in the midst of the barbarians." (Letter from Albert Camus to Cadi Benhoura, quoted in Alice Kaplan, op. cit.) In Femme avec chapeau mauve, Baya reveals a pictorial universe already fully formed, two years before this same language stunned Paris. The palette of blues, greens and mauves, the figures wrapped in their cocoons, the bird and the stylised bush - these are all elements of an inner world that Camus described, on the evening of the Maeght opening, as "a kind of miracle".
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About the sale Arab, African & Indian Modernities
Auction location
Auction time 06/18/2026 at 2:30 PM
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