Rating and value of paintings by Chaïbia Talal

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Rating and value of the artist Chaïbia Talal           

The artist Chaïbia Talal leaves behind a rather colorful and figurative work, she is famous for her canvases and drawings. Now, prices for her works are rising under the auctioneers' gavel.

Her paintings are particularly prized, especially by American buyers. The price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €160 to €210,000, a substantial range but one that says a lot about the value that can be attributed to Chaïbia Talal's works.

In 2020, Les tisseuses de chtouka, Paris, January 1987, a colorful oil on canvas from 1987 was sold for €210,000, whereas it was estimated at €160,000 to €180,000.

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

The style and technique of Chaïbia Talal   

Chaïbia Talal (1929 - 2004)is a major figure of Moroccan naïve art and self-taught modernity. Her aesthetic is intuitive, spontaneous and free of academic canons. Her work has a symbolic, feminine and popular dimension, nourished by Moroccan traditions.

She depicts stylized human figures (women, children, musicians, ritual groups). Her recurring motifs are flowers, birds, moons and ornamental elements inspired by Moroccan fabrics and carpets. His bodies are simplified, sometimes disproportionate, with frontal silhouettes.

His faces are schematic, with large oval eyes and a mouth reduced to a pictorial sign. There's no volumetric modeling, the figure reads more like an icon or symbolic motif than a realistic portrait. Her palette is extremely vivid and saturated, with reds, yellows, cobalt blues, acid greens and pinks.

She uses straightforward flat tints, without gradations, sometimes juxtaposed in strong contrasts. Color is a direct emotional language, associated with celebration and vital energy. Light is conceptual, not naturalistic. There are no cast shadows or identifiable light sources.

The luminous space is created by simple color intensity. The organization is frontal, and quasi-architectural, with figures arranged in rows with intuitive symmetries. The spaces are filled with motifs and ornaments, echoing the popular Moroccan aesthetic.

The spaces are filled with motifs and ornaments, echoing the popular Moroccan aesthetic. It shows a tendency towards decorative flatness, inherited from vernacular arts (weavings, ceramics and ritual paintings). Emptiness is rarely preserved, with compositions that are often dense and saturated, in an ascending movement.

The paint is generally applied in thick flat tints, with no glazes or visible repentirs. The brush is sometimes replaced by a more direct, impulsive gesture. The composition is intuitive, with an absence of preparatory drawing and a claimed spontaneity.

She works on canvas or cardboard, with a deliberately raw and simple material. She is culturally influenced by Berber traditions, textile motifs and the bright colors of the souks, but also by folk tales, dreamlike visions and intuitive cosmology (suns, moons, protective symbols).

Her work is deeply emotional, celebrating joy, community and feminine energy. She represents a protective dream world, in contrast to the difficulties of her real life. She sees art as an act of freedom, rejecting realistic figuration in favor of visual poetry.

The life of Chaïba Talal  

Chaïba Talal (1929 - 2004) was born in Chtouka (near El Jadida, Morocco) into a modest, rural background. She was orphaned at an early age and married an older man at 13. She became a mother at 14. Her life was marked by poverty and limited access to education. She is illiterate, and learns mainly by observation, memory and gesture.

Before marriage, she works as a domestic and farm laborer. She was also widowed at a very young age, and had to support her son, the future artist Hossein Talal, alone. Her daily experience was difficult, but her fertile imagination was nourished by oral traditions and vernacular motifs.

According to her, she had a premonitory dream at the age of 25 that told her she would become a painter. She started out self-taught, without any academic training, and used simple materials (cardboard, paper, cheap paints). Her pictorial gesture is totally instinctive, driven by a need for inner expression.

She was spotted by her son, himself a young artist, and by Moroccan painters living in Casablanca. She was introduced to the artist and critic Ahmed Cherkaoui, then to the poet and painter Jean-François Thomé, who played an important role in her discovery.

Chaïma Tabal exhibited for the first time in the early 1960s, arousing astonishment and admiration for the intuitive power of her work. In the 1970s and 1980s, she held numerous exhibitions in Morocco, then abroad (France, Denmark, Italy, Belgium).

Chaïma Tabal first exhibited in the early 1960s, arousing astonishment and admiration for the intuitive power of her work.

She became one of the emblematic figures of Moroccan naive art and self-taught female expression, representing Morocco at major cultural events and actively participating in the recognition of Moroccan painting.

The biographical themes reflected in her work are dignified, colorful women and protective figures with an idealized transposition of her own experiences. She depicts scenes of motherhood, community celebrations and popular rituals.

Chaïba Talal is the first Moroccan woman to achieve major artistic recognition, and is a fundamental figure in the emergence of pictorial modernity in Morocco, outside academism. She inspired several generations of self-taught artists, particularly women, and is today considered a pillar of twentieth-century Moroccan art and an icon of popular female creativity.

Market segmentation and artist rating

The types of work in circulation are mainly oils on canvas, which are the main and most sought-after segment, with strong international demand. There are also gouaches and mixed techniques on paper, with an active, more accessible secondary market.

Behind them, drawings are relatively rare but remain a sought-after segment for collectors of art brut and naïf. His late, typically colorful works have good liquidity, but their valuation is also dependent on their quality.

Small formats (under 40 cm) with stylized portraits and female figures constitute a highly liquid segment. Medium formats (40 - 80 cm) form the core of the market, with full figurative compositions dominating.

Large formats over 80 cm are rarer and highly valued, particularly in Europe and the Gulf. The most sought-after subjects are emblematic female figures, frontlaid silhouettes with large eyes, festive scenes, women's gatherings, maternities, protective symbols with high demand.

Iconic compositions that cumulate several motifs (women, flowers, symbols) are the most highly priced. The valuation criteria are therefore maximum typicity (bright colors, schematic silhouettes, frontal composition), period (1970 - 1980 are the most sought-after decades).

We also note the importance of the palette with saturation, which is better valued than darker works, but also the state of conservation (stable varnish, absence of cracks on thick solids), provenance (elematic Moroccan collections, pioneering galleries (Charpentier, Paris).

France is a historically important market, thanks in particular to the École de Paris and the galleries that supported it. Liquidity is very high for typical small and medium formats, good for gouaches and works on paper, excellent for iconic works with strong stylization and more variable for less structured late works.

She is now one of the highest-priced African artists at auction ; and features prominently among her colleagues-women, following the market's highest rising odds as Bahia Mahieddine, Leonora Carrington, Tamara de Lempicka or Etel Adnan.

Her signature

Not all of Chaïbia Talal's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here is a first example of her signature:

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