Alice Baber

"Rainforest to Palenque, Mexico" Alice Baber, Color Field, Female Abstract

1975

Abstract painter, lithographer and feminist, Alice Baber is recognized for her use of luminous, abstract shapes, particularly in stained canvases filled with transparent, radiant color. For this reason, she is often compared with her contemporary, Helen Frankenthaler. Baber's lyrical compositions often consist of overlapping floating round or ovoid shapes. Born in 1928 in Charleston, Illinois, the artist was dogged by ill-health as a child, forced to spend her winters in Florida to escape the harsh northern winters. Cancer would claim her at the relatively young age of 54. Baber began her art studies early, as if to compensate for a shortened life, studying drawing as an eight-year-old, and taking a college class by age twelve. She attended Lindenwood College in Missouri for two years, then studied with Alton Pickens, a figurative expressionist painter, at Indiana University in Bloomington. She received her M.A. degree there in 1951. Travel was an important activity for Baber in the early 1950s, during her marriage from 1964-1970 to abstract painter Paul Jenkins, and throughout her life. In 1951, she studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau, France, and traveled through Europe. In 1958, she began a several-year period of living in Paris. In 1964, Baber and Jenkins visited Japan for their show at the Osaka Pinacotheca Museum. In the early 1950s, Baber went to live in New York City, where she became a member of a Tenth Street co-operative gallery, the March Gallery, where she had her first one-person show in 1958. She attended the Yaddo Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York for the first time in that year. She was supporting herself by writing, later becoming art editor of McCall's magazine. Baber visited India twice in the 1970s. In 1974, she had a one-person exhibition in New Delhi, the same year she traveled to Iran for a show in Teheran. From 1976 to 1978, Baber traveled to 13 Latin American countries with the U.S. State Department, exhibiting her work and lecturing on art. In 1979, Baber was an artist-in-residence at the Tamarind Institute print workshop. Baber organized exhibitions of women artists, including "Color Forum," in 1972 at the University of Texas, in Austin, and "Color, Light, and Image," in 1975 in New York City at the Women's Interart Center, a show of artists from around the world in recognition of the United Nations International Women's Year. Baber wrote an essay for the catalogue of the Texas show. 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, New York City; the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of California, Berkeley. Her stain paintings, different from but related to those of Paul Jenkins, explored both variations of a single color and rich combinations of multiple colors.