Untitled (Paysage)

Born in Egypt in 1913, Cléa Badaro moved to Switzerland at a very young age. She was a talented piano player yet she had learned to draw before writing. She convinced her parents to let her enroll the School of Fine Arts in Lausanne and returned to Egypt in 1936. She depicted Egyptian scenes of daily life, but she also produced many portraits and landscapes. Most of the latter were painted in the Dolomites in Italy, of which the present lot is a rare example of her expressive painterly touch and her mastery of colour. Not only did Cléa Badaro participate in various group shows in Egypt from 1938 onwards, but she also had two solo shows in 1947 and one in 1952. Furthermore, she exhibited her works at the Venice Biennale in 1950 and 1952, as well as in the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1953.

One of British writer Lawrence Durell's (1912-1990) novels from his famous Alexandrian Quartet, Cléa (1960), was named after Badaro. Durell had met her in the iconic house of the wealthy Ambron family, where he rented a space from 1941 to 1945. Badaro often invited to the house, to paint in the studio shared by Amelia Ambron and her daughter Gilda, who were both artists.