On Saturday October 26, at 3pm, join Alice Kaplan and Harold Augenbraum as they discuss, Kaplan’s latest book, Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris (University of Chicago Press), the first biography of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, celebrated in mid-twentieth-century Paris, her life shrouded in myth.

Seeing Baya tells the story of a young woman seemingly trapped in subsistence who becomes a sensation in the French capital, then mysteriously fades from the history of modern art—only to reemerge after independence as an icon of Algerian artistic heritage. Kaplan uncovers the central figures in Baya’s life and the role they played in her artistic career. The author also looks closely at Baya’s earliest paintings with an eye to their themes, their palette and design, and their enduring influence.
In vivid prose that brings Baya’s story into the present, Kaplan’s book, the fruit of scrupulous research in Algiers, Blida, Paris, and Provence, allows us to see in a whole new light the beloved artist who signed her paintings simply “Baya.”

This event will be in English, it is free with RSVP. Click here for tickets.

ALICE KAPLAN is the Sterling Professor of French at Yale University. She is coauthor of States of Plague, with Laura Marris, and author of Maison Atlas (Le Bruit du Monde), French Lessons, The Collaborator, Looking for “The Stranger,” and Dreaming in French, all also published by the University of Chicago Press. She has been a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

HAROLD AUGENBRAUM is an American writer, editor, and translator. He co-founded, with Alice Kaplan, the Yale Translation Initiative. Previously he was executive director of the National Book Foundation, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Asian American Writers Workshop, and vice chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. Augenbraum has published six books on Latino literature and translations of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition and the Filipino novelist Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El filibusterismo for Penguin Classics.

Credit image: Deux femmes avec vase fond jaune, Baya Mahieddine, Algeria, 1997.