from the Sacred Spaces series

Abstract painter, lithographer, poet and feminist, Alice Baber’s intense luminosity and motion painting of ovals, circles and free-forms expressed radiance of color. Born August 22, 1928 in Charleston, Illinois, the artist was dogged by ill-health as a child and forced to spend her winters in Florida to escape the harsh northern winters. Her family continued to travel back and forth between Illinois and Florida until World War II when gas rationing in 1942 prevented the travels.. 

She began her art studies early, studying drawing as an eight-year-old, and taking a college class by age twelve. Her first art teacher, famous painter Paul Sargent, encouraged her and taught her discipline at an early age. She attended Lindenwood College in Missouri from 1946 until 1949. Then she studied with Alton Pickens, a figurative expressionist painter, at Indiana University in Bloomington. She received her B.A. degree there in 1950 where she studied art, art history, literature and journalism. During that time, Alton Pickens encouraged her to go east to New York.

In 1951, she studied summer school at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau, France. In September 1951 Baber went to live in New York City, where she was included in the city’s lively 1950s art scene, frequenting the Cedar Bar and developing life-long friendships with many AbEx artists of the day. Baber spent hours in the New York City museums studying painters’ composition and techniques. She was inspired by Klee, Fragonard, El Greco, Beckman, amongst others. She supported herself by writing, later becoming art editor for McCall’s magazine. In 1954, before founding the March Gallery, she began to participate in regular panel discussions about modern art at “The Club”, a meeting place for artists to gather and discuss modern art and the criticism that occurred. In 1957 she became a founding member of the March Gallery, a Tenth Street co-operative gallery where she had her first solo show. She was also included in the famous Sixth Stable Gallery Annual exhibition, exhibiting alongside Motherwell, de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan and many others. 

From 1959 to 1968 Baber divided her time between New York City and Paris, with her companion and then husband Paul Jenkins. She attended the Yaddo Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York in 1958. In 1959, Baber traveled to Paris to live with Jenkins. Alice Baber and artist Paul Jenkins were married from 1964-1970, during which they enjoyed traveling. In 1964, Baber and Jenkins visited Japan for their show at the Osaka Pinacotheca Museum.

Alice Baber was widely exhibited, having at least 8 solo shows in New York City with gallery representation at AM Sachs gallery. Her first solo show at AM Sachs was in October 1965.  She exhibited world wide, both in galleries and museums in her lifetime.

An intrepid traveler, Baber visited India twice in the 1970s. In 1974, she had a solo exhibition in New Delhi. The same year she traveled to Iran for a show in Teheran.  In 1976, she traveled to thirteen Latin American countries, lecturing and exhibiting, on a four-month tour sponsored by the United States Information Agency.

Baber organized exhibitions of women artists, including "Color Forum" in 1972 at the University of Texas in Austin, for which she wrote an essay for the exhibition catalog. show. Baber curated and organized numerous exhibitions including the Women's Interart Center exhibition which was a show of artists from around the world in recognition of the United Nations International Women's Year. Phyllis Derfner covered the latter exhibition in the March-April, 1976 issue of Art International.

She participated in and organized numerous feminist exhibitions including “Women Choose Women” initiated by Women in the Arts in 1973.

Baber was a writer and teacher, as well as an artist, serving as artist-in-residence in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico's Tamarind Institute lithography workshop. She taught painting at the New School in New York City; University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of California, Berkeley. Her published writings include essays on color in the 1970s and an essay on Sonia Delaunay, whom she met in Paris during the 1960s. Baber was often featured in the New York Times and in major art publications. On December 29, 1978, the New York Times extolled her as “A prominent colorist since the early 60’s, Alice Baber has charted a course somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting.”

She created her lyrical compositions of buoyant forms with an innovative technique involving thinned oil paint application which she called “sinking and lifting”, which reveals the colors glow and inner light. The titles of her paintings reflect her poetic and positive energy.

She exhibited world wide, both in galleries and museums in her lifetime.

Her work is in the collections of four major New York City museums, the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In Washington, D.C., she is included in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and National Museum of Women in the Arts.  Other collections with her work are museums in New Delhi, India; Manchester, England; Amsterdam, Holland; Osaka, Japan; Israel; Austria; Cologne, Germany, and San Francisco and Santa Barbara, California.

Alice Baber died on October 2, 1982 in New York City at the young age of fifty-four.