IN THE SPOTLIGHT
ALICE BABER
Alice Baber
NEWS AND EVENTS
WOMEN ARTISTS IN ASCENDANCE
Featuring objects on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art alongside the university art collection, Women Artists in Ascendance pulls back the curtain on the story of modern American art by displaying works from a dozen women artists who were goliaths in their own right, including Helen Frankenthaler, Alice Baber, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, Joan Brown, Amanda Williams and other notable women artists.
Exhibition Info:
August 19, 2025 — July 2, 2026
Bill L. Harbert Gallery
ALICE BABER
AN OVERLOOKED PAINTER GETS HER DUE IN A NEW BIOGRAPHY
Distinguished Professor Gail Levin explores how abstract expressionist Alice Baber built a celebrated career and why she later faded from view.
What appealed to you or intrigued you about Alice Baber’s life, her art, or both?
Levin: Alice Baber’s art was so beautiful, but she was completely forgotten despite having major works in 50 museums, including the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. No one knew much about her life, and I was determined to discover her story.
ALICE BABER
As if in a Dream: History, Fantasy, Future
As if in a Dream: History, Fantasy, Future is curated by James Glisson, Chief Curator & Curator of Contemporary Art. This exhibition features Alice Baber, Dominic Chambers, Eduardo Chavez, Rafael Coronel, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Marsden Hartley, Mimi Lauter, Wright Ludington, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Jorge Pardo, Patricia Peco, Lari Pitman, Odilon Redon, Max Hooper Schneider, and Brenna Youngblood, among others.
March 1, 2026 – January 3, 2027
EMILY FRIEDMAN FINE ART
Emily Friedman Fine Art is pleased to present Alice Baber: Luminous Currents, an online-exclusive exhibition on Artsy running from May 14 to August 16, 2026. The exhibition features a focused collection of works on paper, including watercolors and lithographs that highlight Baber’s signature exploration of transparency, movement, and the emotive power of color.
Alice Baber: Luminous Currents
May 14 – August 16, 2026
REVIEWS
ART | BASEL
Art Market Report: The Modern masters are back
Collectors are turning to 20th-century trophy lots as part of a ‘structural rebalancing’ of the trade
The New York-based gallery Berry Campbell, a new exhibitor at Art Basel this year with a booth devoted to women of Abstract Expressionism, works almost entirely with estates with a focus on overlooked Postwar American painters. Cofounded by Christine Berry and Martha Campbell in 2013, the gallery’s presentation at the fair includes works by Lynne Drexler, Alice Baber, and Elaine de Kooning, among others, priced from USD 340,000 to USD 975,000. By Anna Brady
GLASSTIRE
Book Review: “Alice Baber: An Artist’s Triumph Over Tragedy”
Abstract art was booming in New York, and it soon became Baber’s visual language of choice. But unlike her male contemporaries who splattered, dripped, and poured paint with bravado, she applied colors by rubbing the paints into the canvas with her finger, building up her luminous tones intentionally and gradually. “I was certainly a part of a whole movement of artists who were interested in abstraction,” she said in an undated interview, “but my particular direction was not involved with their canons.” In the book, Levin argues convincingly that Baber’s work stemmed from her synesthesia, and that her subsequent disappearance from mainstream modern art history comes in part from the fact that “her art represents a new kind of abstraction.”
By Lauren Moya Ford
THE AUBURN PLAINSMAN
Redefining American art through untold stories at The Jule Museum
In his presentation, Nemerov highlighted the concept of livingness, or a sense of life, that was integral to the works of Frankenthaler. He also detailed how other artists featured in the exhibit portray that sense of livingness in vastly different ways. Some, such as Hartigan, opted for darker bolder motifs, and others, such as Baber, employed lighter and more subtle techniques.
Visitors to the exhibit can see the liveliness of the art with Frankenthaler's "Blue Territory," Hardigan's "Sweden" and Baber's "Lord of the Rainbow" – all being showcased in the exhibit. Ethan Olsen, one visitor to the exhibition, described why he found the storytelling of the collection to be impactful. By Erin Cosby
Photo by Roxy Duda | Photographer | The Auburn Plainsman
ALICE BABER
Celebrating Women Abstract Artists Across America In Women’s History Month
This month, throughout the spring, and continuing all year at museums across America, great women abstract artists of today, and their predecessors, receive a hard earned spotlight.
Phillips auction house in New York presents the most comprehensive selling exhibition ever mounted for pioneering Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painter Alice Baber (1959-1981) through March 26. Presented in partnership with Jody Klotz Fine Art, the exhibition spans more than two decades of Baber’s career and features nearly 30 works, including rare early watercolors and oils seldom seen on the market. By Chadd Scott,
Contributor
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
GENE DAVIS
Gene Davis
NEWS AND EVENTS
THE POTOMACK COMPANY
Gene Davis
Untitled from Peace Portfolio - 1974
Screenprint in colors
Lower left numbered 16/90 and signed and dated: Gene Davis 74
Provenance: Warren G. and Elizabeth F. Wickersham, Virginia
June 25, 2026
GENE DAVIS
We, Too, Are Made of Wonders
The exhibition features artists such as Dorothy Hood, Mildred Thompson and Boramie Ann Sao, who explore abstract theories and scientific laws using rich colors and dynamic movement. Lamar Dodd and Robert McCall observe NASA space missions and attempt to capture their cultural significance. Photographers Arthur Tress and Mark Steinmetz compel audiences to consider the miracle of flight by offering views of the sky from multiple vantage points. John Biggers, Helen Lundeberg and Gene Davis venerate the Earth and sky, reminding viewers to take a moment and look up.
January 24 – June 28, 2026
THE POTOMACK COMPANY
Gene Davis
Smithsonian 20th Anniversary Print, 1985
Screenprint on paper
Smithsonian 20th Anniversary Print, 1985; lower left numbered: 50/200; lower right signed and dated: 1985
June 25, 2026
REVIEWS
A CONVERSATION WITH GENE DAVIS
Do you think it might have something to do with spatial qualities?
What my stripes have become now are quite different from what they started out as. I didn’t really understand what I was about at first. I think maybe the best painters don’t know what they’re doing in the beginning. The painter who can tell you exactly what he’s doing isn’t doing much. At first I didn’t have the foggiest notion of what I was doing. It just seemed like maybe a good idea. Pure whim motivated it. I think that’s a pretty good motivation anyway, to do something just for the sheer hell of it. Later I began to realize there was something behind my decision. You see, I’m a frustrated musician. I studied music all through my teens. But I have a tin ear, and I wasn’t really very good. Painting stripes with musical intervals may be a kind of unconscious compensation for the fact that I never made it as a musician. I don’t set out to do musical paintings—that’s corny. The fact remains, however, that music is an art of interval and my work is an art of interval.
I have always been an interval artist. Even now in the new black and white paintings I’m working on, I am interested in spatial interval. Before it was color interval.
—Barbara Rose
THE PAINTER WHO EARNED HIS STRIPES
Gene Davis, the leading member of the Washington Color School, is celebrated a half century after his striped paintings caught on
“The Smithsonian Institution, which benefitted from a generous amount of his work donated to the museum after his death in 1985 at 64, may have missed the 50th anniversary of the landmark “Washington Color Painters” exhibition last year, but is making up for it with the newly opened “Gene Davis: Hot Beat” at its Smithsonian American Art Museum.
—Roger Catlin - Museums Correspondent
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
JON SCHUELER
Jon Schueler
NEWS AND EVENTS
ART AT KIRKCALDY GALLERIES
Collecting the Contemporary: Scottish Art at Kirkcaldy Galleries
This display features works by modern and contemporary painters who were inspired by Scotland. In addition to works by John Bellany, Ken Currie, Callum Innes and Jon Schueler,
31 Jan 2025 - 31 Dec 2027
JON SCHUELER
JON SCHUELER
REVIEWS
JON SCHUELER
How the World’s Great Artist Foundations Stay Solvent
Behind the philanthropy, the grants and the named galleries lies a surprisingly rigorous set of revenue streams.
The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation has been in operation for half a century, but keeping an artist-endowed foundation in business is not a sure thing. Magda Salvesen, director of the Jon Schueler Foundation, formed in 2024, told Observer that “nothing is very solid in the art world. The appreciation of artists’ works is totally unpredictable, with excellent years of demand and then a fizzling out. By Daniel Grant
ARTNET
Inside a New Gallery Championing Postwar Abstraction
In a time marked by mass gallery closures, Matthew Shamnoski took the leap from online to brick and mortar with a gallery dedicated to stewarding the architects of 20th-century abstraction.
I’m very excited about our next exhibition, “Jon Schueler: Moods and Memories,” which centers on works Schueler created as dedications and remembrances—most notably paintings dedicated to his widow, Magda Salvesen, who continues to lead the foundation. These works reveal a deeply personal dimension of Schueler’s practice, where memory and emotional attachment become inseparable from abstraction. The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Max Woertendyke’s new short documentary, Woman in the Sky (2025), which focuses on Magda and the legacy she has helped shape. We’ll be hosting a screening at the opening reception on February 12.
THE NEW CRITERION
OF SOUND MIND
by Erik Anjou
On the life and work of the painter Jon Schueler.
A number of years ago I was introduced to the work of Jon Schueler (1916–92), the Abstract Expressionist painter, protégé of Clyfford Still, and subject of the first solo show at Leo Castelli’s new gallery in 1957. Expansive, luminous works that hover between abstraction and representation, swaths and splashes of soft-edged color that float like clouds from the canvas—to cut to the chase, I became an acolyte. Both a Schueler painting and his heralded autobiography, The Sound of Sleat, adorn my Inwood apartment.
JON SCHUELER
Acclaimed Art World Documentary from Executive Producer David Corenswet Expands National Reach with Austin Film Festival Selection
"Woman in the Sky" Offers an Intimate Portrait of Love, Legacy, and Magda Salvesen's Pioneering Role in Artist Estate Management.
ETHICS PRESS
Infused with Place
The Translation of Scotland's Geography in Paintings of the Sea
by Joe Boyd
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
ENRIQUE CARBAJAL GONZALEZ
Enrique Carbajal González
NEWS AND EVENTS
MORTON SUBASTAS
LIVE AUCTION
Subasta de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo
SEBASTIAN. Durero 4. Firmada y fechada 1996. Escultura transformable en poliuretano 216/500. 20.5x20.5x20.5cm
Jun 25, 2026
MORTON SUBASTAS
LIVE AUCTION
Subasta de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo
SEBASTIAN. Sin título. Firmada. Serigrafía 30 / 30. 57 x 38 cm imagen / 64 x 46.5 cm papel
Jun 25, 2026
MORTON SUBASTAS
LIVE AUCTION
Subasta de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo
SEBASTIAN. Sin título. Firmada y fechada 2005. Escultura en bronce 16 / 20. 16.25 x 7 x 5.5 cm medidas totales
Jun 25, 2026
MORTON SUBASTAS
LIVE AUCTION
Subasta de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo
SEBASTIAN. Acuario, de la serie Zodiaco. Firmada y fechada 2009. Escultura en bronce a / p. 20 x 8.5 x 8.5 cm medidas totales
Jun 25, 2026