(Alicja) Alice HALICKA-MARCOUSSI - Lot 23

(Alicja) Alice HALICKA-MARCOUSSI (Krakow 1889-1974 Paris) Cubist landscape, ca. 1918-1920 Oil on canvas. 63 x 46 cm Signed lower right "Halicka [1]918"[1]. Bibliography: unpublished. This lot is presented by Mr. Hubert Duchemin. Born in Krakow in 1889, Alice Halicka began her training in Munich with Simon Hollósy. Hollósy in Munich, before moving to Paris in 1912, where she studied with Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis at the Académie Ranson. It was during this period that she met Louis Marcoussis, also an artist, whom she married in 1913. The couple frequented the avant-garde painters and thinkers in the French capital. During this period, Alice Halicka exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants alongside Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and many others. During the First World War, in the absence of her husband in the absence of her husband, who had volunteered for the French army, she turned to cubism, while maintaining a highly personal style. The artist recalls this period in these words I was doing cubism, a cursed art for them, an anti-Greek art that referred to negro art". Negro art". This new landscape, with its pronounced Cézanne accents, is fully in line with this trend and testifies to its stylistic modernity. The art critic Waldemar George to call her "the most gifted woman painter of her time". This canvas is also reminiscent of the landscapes painted by her compatriot Moïse Kisling. According to Matylda Borcuch, a specialist on the artist, "The geometric house evokes Halicka's Breton canvases, painted around 1930 and exhibited at the at the Crillon Gallery in Philadelphia in 1931. This work differs, however, in its palette palette: unlike the Breton works, with their blurred backgrounds and reddish-blue tones, this this canvas features a real landscape, with the greenery of the South of France. It could be reminiscence, a few years later, of a summer 1914 stay in Saint-Raphaël. Saint-Raphaël". Combining a great sense of composition with a real talent for color, Alice Halicka displays her full talent here, with a clever play on reserve and a particularly bold treatment of the light reflected on the palisade. on the palisade. Abandoning Cubism at her husband's behest just after the First World War, the artist exhibited at Berthelet & Cie, the artist exhibited with Berthe Weil in 1922, but also with other leading Bernheim, Druet and Levy.