The Brooklyn Rail

Alice Baber is exceptional among once overlooked, now rediscovered postwar artists, as evidenced not only by the steady momentum that has gathered behind her art in the past year—at auctions and art fairs, in solo presentations in New York and London, and with a rush of scholarship capped off by a forthcoming biography by art historian Gail Levin—but also by the vitality and persuasiveness of the works on display in Colors of the Rainbow, organized by Jody Klotz Fine Art in collaboration with Leslie Feely Gallery. The twelve paintings (ten oils and two watercolors) date from 1960 to 1981, the year before Baber’s untimely death from cancer at age fifty-four. She was of the generation that moved away from the pathos and painterliness of 1950s abstraction, though unlike many of her contemporaries, Baber did not have a prolonged or significant Abstract Expressionist phase. From the start, her mature painting was based upon the emotional resonance of color.

Light, space, and color were the focus of Baber’s art, and while these qualities were not uncommon as subjects for art in the 1960s and ’70s—artists as disparate as Donald Judd, Victor Vasarely, Julio Le Parc, and Sam Francis worked with them—she synthesized them in a manner unlike her contemporaries. Baber’s cosmic perspective and her interest in the energy and motion of color relate her more to early modernist painters like the Orphists, particularly Sonia Delaunay, with whom she became acquainted during her time in Paris in the late 1950s. (It is a fortuitous coincidence that a major exhibition of Orphism opened at the Guggenheim the same week as this show.)

Watercolor was crucial to Baber’s practice. She seems to have used the medium as a way to work through pictorial ideas and painterly techniques; at each stage in her career, from her splotchy, densely colored early paintings, to her pale and diaphanous late works, one finds corollaries in watercolor to her oil paintings. More importantly, she developed a manner of applying oil paint—techniques she called “sinking” and “lifting”—that allowed her to capture the fluidity and transparency of watercolor. After using rags to spread thinned oil paint to the primed canvas, Baber would use a cloth or paper tissue to draw within the still-wet pigment, at once placing and removing color, and leaving haloes of lighter color inside the existing form. Soft edges and areas of blending color characterize two of the earliest paintings in the show, Just Arrived (1962) and Where They Meet (1963). In the former picture, buoyant light seems to pour forth from within, bubbling up to the surface like a spring, while the light in Where They Meet is more radiant and diffuse, and the scene nearly resembles a landscape where all the elements of nature have dematerialized into flowing and illuminated color.

In subsequent years, certain forms, all of them biomorphic, emerge and reappear: ovoids that recall pebbles smoothed by the flow of water, and petal-like triangles and diamonds with rounded edges. Around the same time that Baber began working with these more discrete shapes, transparency and opacity became central to her paintings. Because she worked on gessoed surfaces, unlike the Color Field painters who stained pigment into the canvas, the accumulated layers of color on the surface of a painting like Axe in the Grove (1966) appear as if lit from behind. The translucent blues and phthalo greens that sweep in from the edges and corners of the canvas lead one’s eye into and through the surface, which is virtually impossible to fix in space, as pockets of light push some colors forward while drawing others back. The surface plane of Baber’s paintings is like the surface of water: definite and substantial yet transparent and penetrable.

Hermit in the Cave of Light (1976), the largest work in the show, is the most spacious and luminous. Light spills down and outward from the top of the painting, where its pictorial space is deepest, advancing and receding on the vertical axis, as in the landscape scroll style of Ming dynasty China. Each glowing form in the work seems to illuminate the others, and in contrast to the layered patterning of shapes in Axe in the Grove, the forms in Hermit in the Cave of Light read more dimensionally, as if one is seeing different facets of a complex of organic shapes. These subtleties define Baber’s art and contribute to its holistic appeal to the senses. The space within her paintings is vast, a generous and open space made for the viewer.