I always get so fucking mad when I remember that it’s actually a 16-year-old Algerian girl who influenced BOTH Picasso and Matisse. and. No one gives a rat’s ass about her work which was very focused on women and nature. History -or people dare I say- didn’t bother to remember her name because she was a young Algerian woman and no one cares about Maghrebi/Arab women. unlike P*casso & M*tisse who both became legends, almost gods both during their lives and after their deaths, no one knows her.
Her name was Baya Mahieddine.
i hope that more people know about her now, especially seeing as OP literally linked to an article about a Baya Mahieddine exhibition in 2018.
It is remarkable that she had such a strong practise and had great influence at 16. Despite various disruptions that caused her to stop painting, she returned to her practise from the 60s until the end of her life.
It was within her work that Baya found freedom. The world she painted, after all, is one where women assert their individuality and are free from the men who attempt to brand them with labels, keep them inside the home, or hold them back in any way. “If I change my paintings, I will no longer be Baya,” the artist said in 1991, after her husband died and she’d returned to painting. “When I paint, I am happy and I am in another world.”
More on Mahieddine’s work here.
