Alice Bailiy (Swiss,1872-1938)
Oil on canvas, 32 x 23 1/2 in. 1917
Alice Bailly''''s Self-Portrait of 1917 clearly demonstrates the influence of fauve, cubist, and Italian futurist art. Despite the standard three-quarter-length pose, this painting is a curious mixture of recognizable and unclear elements. The artist''''s hands, while stylized, elongated, and rubbery looking, are nonetheless easy to distinguish, as is the paint brush held in one hand and the palette, covered with dabs of bright color and held parallel to the picture plane, in the other. However, the area behind the figure-sections of gray, blue, and red-orange, sometimes overlaid with diagonal slashes-is ambiguous.
Although strong, dark outlines define Bailly''''s shoulders and breasts, there is no sense of her torso. The strangest part is the figure''''s face. Framed by Bailly''''s bobbed hair and signature wire-rimmed eyeglasses, one side of the face appears to have been painted out. The unexplained absence of one eye and half the mouth is profoundly unsettling. This effect represents neither cubist fragmentation of forms nor the futurist obsession with movement that fascinated Bailly from the 1910s. Instead, it appears to reflect a dissociation of the artist from her own image-in short, a kind of identity crisis.