George Baer painted Masouba during his second extended trip to North Africa in 1927, when he and his artist brother Martin lived at Colomb-Béchar, an oasis in the Algerian Sahara about 400 miles south of Oran. The sitter’s elongated, half-length figure is pressed close to the picture plane. She rests her right hand on her head and looks down to her right. The girl has a pensive, remote expression. In the left background a bearded man is engrossed in reading a text of some kind. The painting’s title was derived from the girl’s Arabic name. Baer commented on the sitter’s background:
The young girl in this painting was the daughter of a mixed marriage of Jewish and Moorish parentage. When the Jews and Moors migrated from Spain to North Africa, it appears both Jews and Moors had a great deal in common—survival. So, when this group settled here they not only forgot or overlooked all prejudices and differences of religious beliefs, but worked and lived together and also intermarried. There was not the slightest vestige of segregation of Jews as prevailed in most of North Africa.
There are many possible antecedents for the painting’s imagery. Masouba recalls the North African exoticism and Orientalism of Eugène Delacroix, an artist with whom both Baer brothers were—and still are—often compared. The deliberate distortion evident in the exaggerated, elongated features of the two figures is also clearly related to El Greco and to German expressionism, a movement with which the Baers became familiar during their academic training in Munich. George and his brother may also have been consciously following the examples of Paul Klee and August Macke, who in 1914 had sought artistic inspiration in Tunisia. The unusually bold brushwork of Masouba is, moreover, similar to the technique of the expressionist painters Chaim Soutine and Oskar Kokoschka. Despite these many precedents Bulliet concluded that the North African works were more than the sum of their influences: “The Baer brothers have evolved something that is recognized in France and America as distinctively ‘Baer.’ It is easy to trace their influences. . . . But all such influences are offset . . . by something that is distinctively their own, that springs out of their inner consciousness and is readily recognizable in everything they paint.”
A series of paintings that the brothers made during their initial visit to the area in 1925 had immediately garnered critical acclaim and attracted buyers when they were exhibited in the spring of 1926 at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, Paris, and later that year at the Art Institute of Chicago. Noting that the Baers “found the Algerians as much to their liking as Gauguin found the Tahitians,” in 1928 Bulliet extolled the works from the second trip—including Masouba—for “a loosening up of their technique, and a greater spontaneity of spirit.” Masouba is a highly representative example of George Baer’s style of the 1920s, the most productive and successful decade of his career. Neither George nor Martin was ever able to repeat the critical acclaim of their North African subjects.
Robert Torchia
August 17, 2018
