The Light Center of the Pink Mountain

Dated, signed and inscribed (on the overlap): ’1977 Alice Baber The Light Center of the Pink Mountain’.

Provenance

Private collection, Washington D.C.

By descent.

Sotheby’s, New York, sale N11427, Contemporary Curated, 27 September 2024, lot 103.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above sale).

Alice Baber is best known for her lifelong dedication to the study of biomorphic forms and the infinite possibilities of light and colour through painting. Baber initially worked primarily in oils but began experimenting with watercolour paints in the 1950s. Her exploration of watercolour initiated a shift in style for Baber as she went from painting still lifes to creating more abstracted works. By the time of her first solo exhibition, held in October 1958 at March Gallery, New York, Baber had left behind still life to become a fully abstract painter. A contemporary review in Artnews remarked that in her free abstractions, Baber ‘paints a world in which everything is gloriously falling.’

Her abstract works, created with the help of her so-called ‘stain and lift technique’, focus on colour and form, with shapes such as the circle being a common and recurring motif. As pointed out by Sylvia Moore (in North American women artists of the twentieth century: a biographical dictionary, 1995):

The year 1958 was a crucial one for Baber. She had her first solo show at March Gallery and […] while working on an oil painting “Battle of the Oranges”, she first perceived that the circle possessed an infinite range of possibilities for exploration of colour and light, an insight that directed her toward a more distinctive personal image in her art. […] Baber developed a unique stain and lift technique of painting while her distinctive palette evolved through many stages. For a time she worked solely with reds, but as she progressively eliminated opacity, she explored yellows, greens, and lavender, largely monochromatically. By the early 1960s, she began to use a great variety of colours on a single canvas, and by the mid-1970s introduced black, achieving some of her most subtle and delicate effects.

In April 1959, when Baber was included in a show at the Tenth Street gallery, New York, a reviewer (writing under the signature ‘I.H.S.’) also observed (in ‘Tenth Street’, Artnews 58, April 1959) that she had transmuted ‘the fruits and vegetables of past canvases into a circular calligraphy of emotional yellows and oranges.’

While Baber is often contextualised as an abstract expressionist, recent exhibitions and scholarship have opened up her work to new interpretations. The essay by Dan Cameron (born 1956, American contemporary art curator), in the catalogue for the 2024 Alice Baber exhibition, Reverse Infinity, at Barry Campbell in New York, for example, made a compelling case for seeing Baber through the lens of Orphism (a modernist movement from the 1910s founded in Paris by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, which specifically focused on the effects of light and colour).

Baber did actually meet Sonia Delaunay in Paris and wrote an article (‘Sonia Delaunay’, Craft Horizons) about her in 1973. Baber, in considering her own artistic practice, is also famously known to have quoted Sonia Delaunay’s line, ‘Colours are notes of a poetic language which expresses states of soul’. Indeed, when seen from that perspective, Baber’s work seems much more concerned with colour and light in space, than the importance of powerful individual gestures often propagated by the abstract expressionists.

Baber once described her painting practice as a ‘way to get the light moving across the whole thing. An abstract painting is outer space, and I am in front of it, suspended’, she explained, ‘so that there isn’t any horizon line. However, there is probably a sense of up and down and side to side.’

Much like her fellow contemporary American artist Mark Rothko (1903–1970, painter best known for his colour field paintings depicting irregular and painterly rectangular regions of colour. Although Rothko did not personally subscribe to any one school, he is associated with the American abstract expressionism movement of modern art) and Barnett Newman (1905–1970, painter regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism as well as one of the foremost colour field painters. His paintings explore the sense of place that viewers experience with art and incorporate the simplest forms to emphasise this feeling), Baber created seemingly simple compositions with large areas of colour intended to produce a contemplative or meditational response in the viewer. However, she did so in a distinctly personal and unique way. As Sylvia More puts it, ‘Critics often tried to associate Baber’s work with various stylistic trends, but the paintings elude categorization. Her circles, ovals, and free-form shapes are always imbued with undulating, sensuous movement, and her pure, translucent colours create a sense of radiance that is her artistic signature.’

Copyright Firestorm Foundation