Cubism, Dadaism, Orphism, and Futurism. She was a member of the early twentieth century avant-garde and pioneered the notion of "wool paintings".
Alice Bailly's painting The Rhythmiciennes, 1918-1919, is 82 x 66.5 cm and was created with wool, silk, pasted papers, and ink on canvas. It is owned by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne.
Alice Bailly (1872-1938), while never forgotten by the people of Geneva and Valais, is not appreciated at her actual worth on an international scale, despite the fact that she forged a destiny as an ambitious artist in Switzerland, Germany, and France.
She was born in Geneva in 1872 and studied at the École des demoiselles before moving to Naples and Munich in the early twentieth century, then to Paris in 1904. There she met Fernand Léger and Marie Laurencin and immersed herself in the creative ferment, which ranged from the Fauves to Cubism. Apollinaire noted her rhythmic artwork, which was also influenced by Futurism, and classified her as an Orphist. She has shown in the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne in Paris, as well as the Kunsthaus in Zurich and the Rath Museum in Geneva. She returned to Switzerland in 1914 and was present when Dada was founded in 1916. Following the war, she moved between Lausanne and Paris and, despite a few famous shows, never achieved true success. She died in her studio on January 1, 1938, and except from two retrospectives held in Switzerland that year and another in Geneva in 1957, she vanished...
Her work.
Bailly's art is mostly figurative, with elements from dance and music regularly appearing. In paintings from the 1910s, such as Bacchanale dans les rochers (1912, Geneva), the feminine form is shown in arabesques in a manner reminiscent of Matisse. The artist later criticized war in Futurist works (La Bataille de Tolochenaz, 1916, Pictet Collection). The artist's unique style was discovered following World War I. Alice Bailly invented "wool paintings" by replacing painting with colorful wool threads flung around canvases (Les Rythmiciennes, 1918-1919, Lausanne, ill. on the front page), following a Dadaist approach. This notion distinguishes them from needlework while rejecting any hierarchy between fine and practical arts, masculine and feminine.
Alice Bailly's painting, The Caprice of the Beauties, 1918, is an oil on canvas measuring 65 x 81 cm and was sold at Sotheby's in 2010. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. seen in France www.vwart.com
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