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Ad Code: 2
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from Auction House Records.
Still Life with Slate Green Wall
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, William Bailey became a painter in styles ranging from abstraction to super-real. He earned his B.F.A. and M.F.A. at Yale University and studied with Josef Albers and also had an Alice Kimball English traveling scholarship.
From 1962 to 1969, he taught at Indiana University, and from 1969, was a professor of art at Yale University.
He lives and works in Branford, CT and is a member of the National Academy of Design, elected an Associate in 1983, an Academician in 1994.
Recent one-person exhibitions include Robert Schoelkopf Gallery; Andre Emmerich Gallery; Robert Miller Gallery; Galleria il Gabbiana, Rome; and Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris. Selected group exhibitions include Realism Now, Vassar College Art Museum; 22 Realists, and 7 Realists, both at the Yale University Art Gallery; Decade in Review, Whitney Museum of American Art; and Contemporary American Realism Since 1960,at the Pennsylvania Academy.
His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Des Moines Art Center; Art Institute of Chicago; Arkansas Art Center; Hirshhorn Museum; Pennsylvania Academy; St. Louis Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Yale University Art Gallery.
Publications on Mr. Bailey include "William Bailey", by Mark Strand, William Bailey, Hollander and Briganti; and "Art of the Real", Mark Strand & Clarkson Potter.
Mr.Bailey is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; Ingram Merrill Fellowship; and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Letters; and Academico, Academia Nationale, S.Luca, Rome.
Source:
http://www.nationalacademy.org/
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The following is from Robert Hughes, "American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America"
"It took time - too much time - for the magnitude of Diebenkorn's achievement to be fully recognized in New York. For entirely figurative artists, of course, it was harder still. They were reluctantly granted a niche at the side of the "mainstream," but not much more. Few people in the 1970s would have taken the view that, for all the difficulty of comparing apples and oranges, the calm and timelessly ordered still-lives of William Bailey were at least as full of pictorial intelligence and visual subtlety as anything in color-field painting, although it was obvious that they belonged to a different order of pictorial ambition from that of most American realism at the time, which tended to be anecdotal and nostalgic.
There was nothing nostalgic or narrative about Bailey's work. Its calm arrays of pots, jugs, eggs, and bowls make up an ideal form-world, Platonic in its removal from "the itch of desire." Nothing spills out, thrusts forward, or wants to be touched or possessed - the traditional solicitations of still-life painting, most materialistic of arts. They are as removed from touch (and as grandly articulate in their scale) as the façade of a fine quattrocento building, seen from the other side of the piazza: it is no accident that Bailey should have had a profound attraction to Italy, or that he spent summers in Monterchi, where Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto presides in the local cemetery. They are less domestic and tactile than Chardin and more precise (and, crucially, less modest) than Morandi. Distance envelops them; they are, as his friend the poet Mark Strand put it, "realizations of an idea," in which all the groping toward the idea has been submerged - an extreme opposite to the American taste for works of art which bear the signs of their struggle, unedited, in their final form."
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following was written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California:
Truly original art is often praised in its own time with a kind of misperception or misunderstanding of its deep qualities. William Bailey is frequently characterized by curators, reviewers and even by some of his collectors as one of the country's leading realists. Yet his remarkable still lifes and nudes, distinguished by an unmistakable style and a characteristic meditative searching for paricular moments of aesthetic challenge, are in fact more attuned to modernist concerns than to mere recording of contemporary urban life.
From the very beginning Bailey's still lifes were "abstract" in several ways. They have never been done from an array of objects on a tabletop in the studio, but are composed on the canvas itself. It is not the banal literal presence of a set of objects that these paintings call up, but rather their metaphoric activity-their figurativeness that no mere rendering, however stylish, mannered or elegant, could establish. Bailey prefers the term figurative rather than realistic, which he feels is too easily going back to illustration.
Modest in scale and completely unrhetorical, his pictures seem European - the work, perhaps, of a less mature Balthus, minus the overtones of perverse eroticism. Their strength lies partly in the extreme discipline of organization; he is a perfectionist.
Sources include: An Extreme and Abstract Clarity by John Hollander, Artnews magazine
Time magazine, January 31, 1972
William Bailey, An American Classic by Hilton Kramer, Art & Antiques
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| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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