Nima Sagharchi
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Lot 38*
Clea Bardaro(Egypt, 1913-1968)Still Life
12 October 2016, 14:00 BST
London, New Bond Street£5,000 - £7,000
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Clea Bardaro (Egypt, 1913-1968)
Still Life
oil on board, framed
signed (lower left)
43 x 39cm (16 15/16 x 15 3/8in).
oil on board, framed
signed (lower left)
43 x 39cm (16 15/16 x 15 3/8in).
Footnotes
Badaro was born in Cairo in 1913, on the island of Zamalek. After the death of her Greek mother, her father, who was a lawyer and business man, took his two daughters, Jeanne and Clea, to live with their maternal grandmother in Montreux, Switzerland.
Bardaro attended school in Montreux until age sixteen, Badaro, and then enrolled at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Lausanne. There she designed a number of posters, one of which she sold to Josephine Baker who was on tour in Switzerland at the time. In her final year, she was awarded the Grand Prix for her poster entitled L'Égypte, which was later acquired by the Egyptian Ministry of Communications. She graduated in about 1934.
Badaro returned to Egypt after graduation and settled in Alexandria. During the war years she worked in the hospitals and canteens frequented by soldiers returning from battle in the northern desert.
During that time she painted scenes of sailors, bars, and soldiers in cabarets, some of which today can be found in Egyptian museums of modern art. She established a studio in the Atelier of Alexandria. She was introduced there to the British novelist Lawrence Durrell who was posted in Alexandria during the war as press attaché for the British Foreign Office Bardaro sketched Durrell, and he in turn would later portray her as the character "Clea" in his tetralogy: "The Alexandrian Quartet"