Untitled (Portrait)
Drypoint printed in blue-black graphite mixed with silver, 1974
Signed and dated lower ight (see photo)
From: Series entitled Six Drypoints
Edition: 23 (4/23)
Numbered lower left (see photo)
Print Shop: Crown Point Press
Printer: Jeannie Fine
Publisher: Parasol Press, New York
Note: A portfolio is in the collection of the National Gallery, Australia, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco- de Young/Legion of Honor, Davis Museum at Wellesley College and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Condition: Excellent
Image/Plate size: 6 3/8 x 5 3/8 inches
Sheet size: 24 x 20 inches
From a portfolio of six drypoints, printed with unqiue combination of blue-black graphite shavings combined with silver to create the appearence of an original drawing. I know of no other artist to use a similar printing technique.
William Bailey studied art at the University of Kansas, Yale University and Yale School of Art where he studied with Josef Albers receiving his MFA in 1957.
Mr. Bailey’s first exhibition in New York was at Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in 1968, where he showed regularly until its closing in 1990. During the 90’s he exhibited at the Andre Emmerich Gallery and on its closing, exhibited at the Robert Miller Gallery. In 2004 Bailey moved to the Betty Cuningham Gallery where his most recent exhibition was held from April 30 - June 11, 2016.
Mr. Bailey’s work has been exhibited extensively in both America and Europe. He is represented in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting in 1965. Mr. Bailey was elected to The National Academy of Design in 1983 and to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986.
Mr. Bailey taught at The Yale School of Art from 1958 to 1962 and from 1969 to 1995. He has also taught at The Cooper Union, University of Pennsylvania and Indiana University. He maintains studios in New Haven and in Umbertide, Italy.
Courtesy Betty Cunningham Gallery
Tribute to William Bailey
THE NEW YORK TIMES
William Bailey, whose pristine, idealized still lifes and female nudes made him one of the leading figures in the return of figurative art in the 1980s, died on April 13 at his home in Branford, Conn. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Alix Bailey.
Beyond his painting, Mr. Bailey influenced generations of students in his many years as a teacher at the Yale School of Art.
In some of his best-known work, Mr. Bailey arranged simple objects — the eggs, bowls, bottles and vases that he once called “my repertory company” — along a severe horizontal shelf, or on a plain table, swathing them in a breathless, deceptively serene atmosphere heavy with mystery.
William Bailey, Modernist Figurative Painter, Dies at 89
He swathed his nudes and still lifes of eggs, vases, bottles and bowls in a breathless, deceptively serene atmosphere heavy with mystery.
The painter William Bailey in 2009. He was never given a career survey in a major museum, but his influence, particulary on students at Yale, was deep.
Ford Bailey
By William Grimes for the New York Times
April 18, 2020
William Bailey, whose pristine, idealized still lifes and female nudes made him one of the leading figures in the return of figurative art in the 1980s, died on April 13 at his home in Branford, Conn. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Alix Bailey.
Beyond his painting, Mr. Bailey influenced generations of students in his many years as a teacher at the Yale School of Art.
In some of his best-known work, Mr. Bailey arranged simple objects — the eggs, bowls, bottles and vases that he once called “my repertory company” — along a severe horizontal shelf, or on a plain table, swathing them in a breathless, deceptively serene atmosphere heavy with mystery.
His muted ochres, grays and powdery blues conjured up a still, timeless world inhabited by Platonic forms, recognizable but uncanny, in part because he painted from imagination rather than life.
“They are at once vividly real and objects in dream, and it is the poetry of this double life that elevates all this humble crockery to the realm of pictorial romance,” Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times in 1979.
Mr. Bailey’s female figures, some clothed in a simple shift or robe and others partly or entirely nude, are disconcertingly impassive, implacable and unreadable, fleshly presences breathing an otherworldly air.
The critic Mark Stevens, writing in Newsweek in 1982, credited Mr. Bailey with helping to “restore representational art to a position of consequence in modern painting.”
But his version of representation was entirely idiosyncratic, seemingly traditional but in fact “a modernism so contrarian,” the artist Alexi Worth wrote in a catalog essay for the
William Harrison Bailey...