Background

Alice Bailly was born on February 25, 1872, in Geneva, Switzerland to modest family. Her father died when she was fourteen. He worked as a Post Office official. Her mother was a German teacher. Alice also had two sisters.

Education

At seventeen, Alice Bailly attended the École des Beaux-Arts and took women's-only courses.

Career

By 1906, Bailly had settled in Paris, where she became friends with many avant-garde modernist painters, including Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin.

Paris was the place where Bailly was to develop in a new artistic direction. At the beginning, she painted and made woodcut prints, which were powerfully vibrant and graphically ingenious, but did not yet display the character that was later key to the success of her oil and wool paintings. With close attention to the artistic trends around her, Alice Bailly increasingly developed into an observer of two different perspectives on perception and cognition, Cubism and Futurism, whose pictorial techniques she gradually internalized and implemented in narrative and expressive themes.

In 1908, her new paintings hung at the Salon d'Automne alongside the art of the principal Fauve painters. Continuing her stylistic experimentation, Bailly developed her own variation of Cubism and Futurism. In 1912, her work was chosen to represent Switzerland in a traveling exhibition seen in Russia, England, and Spain.

When World War I broke out, Bailly returned to Switzerland, where she invented "wool paintings", mixed-media works in which short strands of colored yarn imitated brush strokes. In 1923, Bailly moved to Lausanne and stayed there the rest of her life, continuing to exhibit regularly.

During her last years in Switzeland, she produced eight walls panels for the foyer of the Theatre de Lausanne.

Achievements

• Alice Bailly was an outstanding painter. Her artwork cemented her place as a leader among not just female artists, but early 20th century artists as a whole. Some of her notable work includes: Skating in Boulogne (1914), Self-portrait (1917), and Market in Verona (1926).
  
  According to her will, the proceeds from the sale of her art should be used for a trust to help young Swiss artists.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Archers

    1911

  • Equestrian Fantasy with Pink Lady

    1913

  • Cemetery

    1913

  • The Battle of Tolochenaz

    1916

  • Self-portrait

    1917

  • Beauties' Fancy

    1918

  • Beyond the Radiant Valley (Reiderfurka)

    1918

  • Tea Time

    1920

  • A Chilly Morning in Luxembourg

    1921

  • Arthur Honegger with "King David"

    1921

  • At Leisure

    1922

  • The Avenue

    1923

  • Fontaine Dans Un Jardin De Rome

    1934

  • Blick Auf Einen Hinterhof

Connections

Friend:

Marie Laurencin

Friend:

Juan Gris

Friend:

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia was a French avant-garde painter and poet. He was successively involved with the art movements such as Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism.

References

• Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and 'Feminine' Art, 1900 to the Late 1920s This illustrated book examines the work and artistic culture of women artists in France during the period when Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani were guiding the development of modern art.
  1996
• International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2015 The special issue of International Yearbook of Futurism Studies for 2015 will investigate the role of Futurism in the oeuvre of a number of Women artists and writers.
  2015