Wright Auction

Born in Charleston, Illinois, American painter Alice Baber is celebrated for her radiant abstract explorations of light and color through layering oval and circular forms. Around the age of five, Baber had decided that she would either become a poet or a painter and, by the age of twelve, she had enrolled in a college-level art class. She later attended Missouri’s Lindenwood College for Women, followed by Indiana University. Upon receiving her Masters of Arts in 1951, Baber departed the U.S. for Europe, where she briefly studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and lived between Paris and New York from the late 1950s until 1968. During this period, she supported herself in part by working as the arts editor for McCall’s.

Baber received her first solo show at March Gallery in New York in 1958. That same year she attended her first artist’s residency at the Yaddo Art Colony and also began her painting Battle of the Oranges, which marked the emergence of her signature style of abstraction. “When I first conceive of a painting, ‬I must feel it, ‬I hear it, ‬I taste it, ‬and I want to eat it,” Baber has written. “‬I start from the driving force ‬of color (‬color hunger); ‬then comes to a second color to provide light, ‬luminous light. ‬It will be the glow to reinforce the first color. ‬I then discover the need of one, ‬two, ‬three, ‬or more colors which will indicate and make movement, ‬establish the psychodynamic balance in midair, ‬allow freedom to take place, ‬add weight at the top and bottom of painting, ‬and create mythical whirlpools between larger forms.”

Baber also worked as a curator and educator; in 1975 she organized the exhibition Color, Light and Image at New York’s Interart Center, featuring 125 women artists from around the world. Between 1976 and 1978, Baber traveled across Latin America, exhibiting her work and offering lectures under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. Baber passed away from cancer in 1982. Today, her work is in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.