Self-Portrait

Close up of Self-Portrait

Dynamic painting features a backdrop of red, orange, and blue hues. The artist's face, hands, and body are composed of conjoined geometric and organic shapes in a neutral color palette. Her left eye and hands are explicitly described, as is artist's palette on her right.
Dynamic painting features a backdrop of red, orange, and blue hues. The artist's face, hands, and body are composed of conjoined geometric and organic shapes in a neutral color palette. Her left eye and hands are explicitly described, as is artist's palette on her right.
Alice Bailly, Self-Portrait, 1917; Oil on canvas, 32 x 23 1/2 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay; Photo by Lee Stalsworth

Aside from the figure’s three-quarter-turn pose, this painting presents an avant-garde version of the traditional artist’s self-portrait. Through her training and travels, Alice Bailly became attuned to many vital European art movements of the early 20th century. Her apartment in Geneva was a popular meeting place for artists, poets, and musicians, but she did not identify with any particular movement. Her painting style is an amalgam of many approaches.

Her self-portrait’s red, orange, and blue hues echo the palette of Fauve paintings. (In 1906, when she entered a canvas depicting a mother and child in Paris’s Salon d’Automne, organizers hung it in the Fauve section.) The arching lines forming her hands and arms echo Italian Futurist art.

Bailly embraced the insouciance of Dada in this portrait by carefully delineating her breasts, the buttons of her jacket, and her signature bob haircut while painting out the entire right side of her face. As she did with her contemporaneous stitched-wool works, Bailly painted intuitively and additively. She paired dissonant colors, conjoined geometric and organic shapes, and juxtaposed cleanly outlined forms with choppily brushed passages of paint to form highly dynamic images.

Artwork Details

  • Artist

    Alice Bailly
  • Title

    Self-Portrait
  • Date

    1917
  • Medium

    Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions

    32 x 23 1/2 in.
  • Donor Credit

    Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay
  • Photo Credit

    Lee Stalsworth
  • On Display

    No