The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 8

In November 1947 a fifteen-year-old prodigy from colonial Algeria named Baya, described variously as Kabyle, Berber, Muslim, and Arab, exhibited her gouaches and clay sculptures at the Parisian gallery of the art dealer Aimé Maeght. Yves Chataigneau, the French governor of Algeria, and Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Paris Mosque, were the sponsors of the exhibition, and the opening attracted some of the most influential cultural figures of postwar Paris: the writers Albert Camus, François Mauriac, and André Breton; the painters Henri Matisse and Georges Braque; the designer Christian “Bebè” Bérard.

Maeght was not a political man, but he understood that this exhibition was not just about art. There was trouble in Algeria. It had been three years since indigenous troops from North Africa were enlisted in the invasion of southern France and sent to die for a country that didn’t consider them citizens, and two years since a V-E Day demonstration in Sétif ended in a massacre of thousands of Algerians by the French army. Hundreds of men were in Algerian prisons for their participation in actions that are now acknowledged as a harbinger of the anticolonial revolution, which would break out seven years later. Cultural events like the Baya exhibition were bandages on a deepening wound.