Alicja (Alice) Halicka
1894 - 1975

Alicja Halicka spent her childhood and early youth in Switzerland and Austria. She studied painting and drawing under Józef Pankiewicz, Leon Wyczółkowski and Wojciech Weiss in Kraków at the private School of Fine Arts for Women run by Maria Niedzielska. In 1912, she went to Munich to continue her artistic training but in the same year moved to Paris and enrolled at Academie Ranson, where she studied under Maurice Denis and Paul Serusier. In 1913, she met and married Louis Marcoussis (Ludwik Markus). This Polish émigré artist couple befriended Guillaume Apolllinaire, Maz Jacob, Andre Salmon, Georges Braques, Juan Gris, Jules Pascin, Raoul Dufy, Maz Ernst, Joan Miro, and the art dealer and poet Leopold Zborowski, among others. They were also in contact with Polish srtists residing in Paris, including Józef Pankiewicz, Eugeniusz Zak, Mojzesz Kisling and Olga Boznańska.

Halicka’s debut took place at the Salon des Independents in 1914, which received a favorable review from Apollinaire. During World War I, while living in Normandy, she further turned to decorative work as well as textile and wallpaper design. Later, she also illustrated books. She traveled extensively, visiting Poland in 1919 with her husband. Her first guaches of the Kraków ghetto were created at this time and later exhibited at the Berthe Weill and Druet galleries. She returned to her homeland again in 1921, meeting sculptor August Zamoyski, composer Karol Szymanowski, writer, philosopher and artist Witkacy (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz), along with prominent members of the literary group Skamander all of who were literary contributors to Wiadomosci Literackie.

The mid-1920s mark an important period in her career, for the first Tooled Romances (Romances Capitonnees) were created then. Halicka and Macoussis lived in London at the time, and they were on friendly terms with Roger Fry, the chief editor of The Burlington Magazine. They joined the circle of artists from the Bloomsbury Group, whose leader and ideologist was Fry.

In the early 1930s, after a number of successful exhibitions, her works were bought by prominent collectors: Gertrude Stein; American, Chester Dale; three were obtained by the famous Barnes Foundation of Merion, Pennsylvania, and several others went to the well-known collection of the Societe Anonyme, an association founded by Katherine Dreier (a painter and promoter of abstract art in America who collaborated with Marcel Duchamp). In the years 1935-1938, Halicak made her three trips to the United States (mainly New York). Through her connections with Helena Rubinstein and Paul Tchelitcheff she was commissioned to create stage designs and costumes for the Metropolitan Opera. She cooperated with Leonide Massine and Georges Balanchine of the Russian and American ballet, and created other designs for Covent Garden in London and the Paris Opera. She organized exhibitions and lectures in America and published illustrations in the fashion magazines Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

After the outbreak of World War II she lived with her husband at CUsset near Vichy; it was there that Marcoussis died. With the war’s end, she moved back to Paris. She traveled to India and the Soviet Union, among other places, and in 1956 to Poland. On the initiative of Eugeniusz Eibisch, a large exhibition of her paintings was organized at the International Press and Book Club in Warsaw. At that time the artist delivered a widely attended lecture at the School of Paris.

Initially, she wa attracted to Cubism, very likely under the influence of Marcoussis and his friends. Following World War I, her painting became dominated by a type of figuration that was in line with Post-Impressionism, with simplified, at times even primitivized, forms. The critic Maurice Raynal wrote of Halicka’s attitude about Cubism and what had remained of it in her later oeuvre: “From Cubism she took not the esthetics, but the discipline and practical methods. In effect her female sensibility prevented her from taking the conception of an art of pure creation” (see Raynal 1927, p.187; English translation in: Perry 1999, p. 227).

At the beginning of the 1920s, Halicka produced a series of gouaches of the Jewish quarter in Kraków. She made her name, however, from Tooled Romances, small compositions in which painting mingled with bas-relief and collage. Utilizing painte scraps of fabric, buttons, feathers, wire, etc., she created compositions with a sentimental, expressive poetry that always revealed both fantasy and an indefatigable decorative talent.

In the 1930s, her landscapes were composed with precisely, yet finely drawn contours combined with a pearly, hazy palette (for example the watercolors from the series Place de la Concorde). Halicka rendered motifs drawn from architecture and classical mythology, achieving a poetic, semi-surreal aura. The critics point to the influence of Raoul Dufy. After the war, she executed a number of cycles of Parisian townscapes as well as views inspired by her travels to India and Poland.

Beginning in 1920, Halicka showed her works at the Paris Salons. In 1928, she exhibitied with the Group of Polish Artists in Paris. In the same year, her paintings appeared as part of the one-woman shows, several of the in Paris (1921, 1923, 1924, 1926, 1928, 1930-31), others in Philadelphia (1931) and New York (1936, 1937), and one in London (1934). Among the books that she illustrated, Enfantines by Valery Larbaud and Children of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill deserve the most attention. She also wrote on art for Le Figaro, L’intransigeant and Die Kunst, among other journals. In 1946, her memoirs entitled Hier (Yesterday), subtitled Souvenirs were published in Paris with an expanded edition appearing in Poland (as Wczoraj, subtitled Wspomnienia) in 1971.

-- Artur Tanikowski

Works in the collection: