Although Baber’s early death in 1982 at only fifty-four allowed her work to be eclipsed, the market has begun to respond energetically to her elegant and beautiful paintings. In the gallery’s comprehensive and fully illustrated 116-page catalogue for Alice Baber: Colors of the Rainbow, Dr. Gail Levin, art historian and biographer, has authored a 10,000-word essay which represents the first major scholarship on the artist, and precedes her upcoming groundbreaking biography which further expounds upon Baber’s life and career. In the catalog essay, Levin introduces Baber, tracing her development from obscure midwestern roots to her emergence as a player in the art scenes of both New York and Paris. Dr. Levin comments about “Exhilaratingly original abstract art by the talented Alice Baber, whose brief life was extinguished much too soon. She remains to teach us all about ambition, determination, dedication, passion, and vision. She managed to write, curate, and travel the world, all while producing an impressive and lasting body of original artwork.” Alice Baber: Colors of the Rainbow opens at Jody Klotz Fine Arts on May 7^th.

Alice was born in 1928 in rural Illinois and, until gas rationing began in World War II, grew up spending winters with her family in Miami, Florida. After a mid-western education, Baber moved to New York in 1951 and met many of the abstract expressionists at the Cedar Bar and The Club. From 1959-1968, she spent half of every year in Paris, France, and exhibited across Europe and in Asia. A world traveler, by the 1970s, she toured for the U.S. government, showing her art across Latin America. She is said to have been “always imaginative.”  Baber later spoke about “color memory, that anything that you remember well you remember in very vivid color, and anything that’s particularly sort of gloomy becomes very gray.… My most interesting memories are in very brilliant color.” Baber wrote poetry and prose. Her published writings include essays on color in the 1970s and on Sonia Delaunay, whom she met in Paris. Baber was often featured in the New York Times and in major art publications. On December 29, 1978, the New York Times described her as “A prominent colorist since the early 60s, Alice Baber has charted a course somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting.”

Baber’s life and art are the subject of a forthcoming biography by Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, and author of biographies of Lee Krasner, Judy Chicago, and Edward Hopper.