Alice Baber

Alice Baber was born on August 22, 1928, in Charleston, Illinois. She began taking college-level painting classes as a child and, after high school, studied art for two years at Lindenwood College for Women in St. Charles, Missouri, before transferring to Indiana University in Bloomington, where she studied with the figurative expressionist painter Alton Pickens. She completed a Master of Arts in painting at Indiana University in 1951 (one gallery source gives 1948, but the weight of documented sources supports 1951), then spent a short period studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau, France, before settling in New York City.

In New York, Baber developed her signature style of luminous, overlapping biomorphic color forms, work that critics placed between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Beyond her studio practice, she was an active organizer on behalf of women artists, co-organizing the exhibition Women Choose Women at the New York Cultural Center in 1972. She taught at institutions including The New School, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Baber died of cancer on October 2, 1982, in New York City, at age 54, according to her New York Times obituary and later biographical sources. She was interred in Fairview Cemetery in Edgar County, Illinois.

Contemporary critics, writing in outlets including The New York Times in the late 1970s, described Baber as a colorist working between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, a framing that has held up in recent reassessments of her work. That reassessment has accelerated since 2023, with Berry Campbell's Reverse Infinity, Lincoln Glenn's recurring exhibitions of her paintings, and Phillips's 2026 selling exhibition Sacred Spaces all positioned as overdue recognition of a painter whose museum holdings long outpaced her market visibility. Gail Levin's 2026 biography, Alice Baber: An Artist's Triumph Over Tragedy, is part of the same wave of renewed scholarly attention.

Baber's auction market has strengthened markedly in recent years. Her confirmed auction record is USD 275,000, for Axe in the Grove (1966), set at John Moran Auctioneers in February 2023. Press coverage tied to Berry Campbell's 2025 exhibition Reverse Infinity has referenced a higher figure for a different painting reportedly sold at Sotheby's, but that figure does not appear in Artnet's own price database, Artprice, Heritage, Rago, or Invaluable, and is not treated here as a confirmed record. Recent gallery activity, including Reverse Infinity and a 2026 PhillipsX selling exhibition organized with Jody Klotz Fine Art, has coincided with rising prices generally. Results at other houses, including Rago and Heritage, remain well below the confirmed John Moran record, underscoring how much a single strong result can move an artist with a thin auction history.

Baber's auction record is thin, with results concentrated in the last three years and a small number of high-value sales driving the headline figures, so any single result should be read with that limited sample size in mind. There is no catalogue raisonne, and no single gallery has been confirmed as her exclusive estate representative; recent scholarship and market activity run through Jody Klotz Fine Art, Berry Campbell, and Lincoln Glenn. Given the recency of the market's rediscovery of her work, collectors should expect continued volatility in reported prices as more paintings come to market and provenance research catches up with renewed demand.