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MILLON RIVIERA

300 - 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) Dancer with Flowers and Fish, 1989 Gouache on paper Signed and dated lower right 89 98 x 73 cm (viewing dimensions). Provenance: collection of Pierre Zaragozi (1941–2021), historian of photography in Algeria; subsequently donated, circa 1998, to his niece. ‘I paint what I feel. I get annoyed when people ask me what I want to express through my painting. I give you the right to find in it whatever you wish (...) I paint. Now it is up to you to feel.’ 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 entered 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 1989 work marks a further stage: the composition tightens, becoming frontal, almost hieratic. The single female figure, her body facing forward and her face in profile, occupies the entire pictorial field in an almost symmetrical bilateral balance; the plant elements, birds and vases echo one another on either side of the central face, defined by its characteristic almond-shaped eyes and lips touched with red. The dress itself becomes a picture within a picture: against a green or red background, the motifs are arranged in bands, concentric circles, crosses and peacock’s eyes — an ornamental vocabulary that draws as much from Kabyle embroidery and Berber carpets as from a personal vision of paradise. 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 re-evaluation 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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