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MILLON RIVIERA

299 - BAYA (Fatma Haddad Mahieddine) (Algeria, Bordj el Kiffan 193…
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Estimate €20,000 - €30,000
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Description
BAYA (Fatma Haddad Mahieddine) (Algeria, Bordj el Kiffan 1931 – Blida 1998) Women with Peacocks and a Basket of Fish, 1977 Gouache on paper Signed and dated 77 100 x 73 cm. Provenance: gift from Zouhir Benguernane (d. 2009) to Jean Zaragozi (1932–2026) and his wife Adeline Sanchez, Blida then France, circa 1980, then by descent. ‘I paint what I feel. I get annoyed when people ask me what I’m trying to express through my painting. I give you the right to find whatever you wish in it (...) I paint. Now it’s up to you to feel it. ” Baya, 1986 Baya (Fatma Haddad, 1931–1998) Introduced to the world in November 1947 by André Breton and Aimé Maeght — she was sixteen, had no formal training, and her first exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in Paris drew universal admiration — Baya then experienced a long period of relative silence. The 1970s–1980s: the return and maturity After her marriage in 1953 to the musician Hadj Mahfoud, and during the years of the Algerian War of Independence, Baya almost entirely stopped painting. In the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, Baya fully rediscovered her artistic voice in an independent Algeria that was then seeking to establish its own cultural references and which elevated certain artists to the status of guardian figures of national identity. She exhibited in Algiers and received support from Algerian cultural institutions. Her visual vocabulary, already distinctive in her youth, became more assertive and enriched: women in sumptuous dresses, birds, fish, flowers and fruit filled increasingly dense compositions, punctuated by a powerful black outline. This work presented here, dated 1977, perfectly illustrates this period of full maturity. The composition features two female figures, one of whom is carrying a child on her back, which anchors her phantasmagorical world in a physical and maternal reality. The blue birds, the fruit hanging from their branches, and the powder-pink background dotted with fan-shaped motifs create a space that is both earthly and enchanted, characteristic of her relationship with nature and femininity. Long confined to the status of an exception or a curiosity — the “Algerian child prodigy” discovered by the Surrealists — Baya has been the subject of a major critical reassessment since the mid-2010s. Her retrospective at the Mucem in Marseille in 2023, and the work of the Baya Committee, responsible for authenticating and championing her work, bear witness to an institutional recognition that is now fully established. On the international market, her gouaches are fetching significant prices and attracting interest from major museum collections worldwide, and no longer just from the Algerian diaspora. Baya is now established as one of the founding figures of North African artistic modernity — no longer on the margins, but at the centre. Expert: Anne-Sophie Joncoux-Pilorget.
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About the sale A collector's world tour: Asian and Oriental art
Auction location
Auction time 06/25/2026 at 11:00 AM
Lot description modified on 06/13/2026 at 9:20 AM
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