SHARED LIGHT: THE ART OF ALICE BABER & PAUL JENKINS

The pair met in New York, then a crucible of avant-garde experimentation. Both were part of the city’s vibrant downtown art scene, moving in similar circles and forging strong ties with like-minded artists, poets, and thinkers. They were briefly married in 1964—a period marked by deep mutual influence and extensive travel together. Their journeys took them across Europe and Asia, most notably to Japan, where they studied at the Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka. The Gutai group’s radical embrace of performative gesture and material experimentation left a lasting impression on both artists, reinforcing their commitment to spontaneity and the physicality of paint. 

Alice Baber developed a luminous, intuitive style using transparent layers of color, often applied in a stain-and-lift technique along with her fingers and hands. Her rhythmic, elliptical forms seem to float across the canvas, driven by what she described as an “infinite range of possibilities for exploring color and light within the form of the circle, always looking for a way to get the light moving across the whole thing.” She viewed color as a spiritual force and was a committed feminist, curating exhibitions to highlight fellow female artists’ work, writing passionately about their artistic freedom, and notably producing platforms such as, "Color Forum" in 1972 at the University of Texas, in Austin, and "Color, Light, and Image," in 1975 in New York City at the Women's Interart Center to amplify the voices of women in the art world during a time when they were often marginalized. 

Paul Jenkins, best known for his visionary Phenomena series, developed an intuitive technique of pouring paint onto carefully primed canvas and guiding the flow with a palette knife to shape vibrant, translucent fields of color. It was Alice Baber who gave Jenkins his first ivory palette knife, a key tool that helped him create the distinctive textures and forms in his work. His paintings—fluid, luminous, and theatrical—reflect his deep fascination with mysticism, Jungian psychology, and Eastern philosophies, all of which infused his art with spiritual and psychological depth. 

Despite the brevity of their marriage of six years, their shared experiences —rooted in travel, experimentation, and a belief in the power of abstraction—fueled their respective evolutions. Their legacies continue to influence contemporary abstractionists, and their unique visual languages—Baber’s radiant harmonics and Jenkins’s elemental gestures—remain emblematic of a generation that sought to translate emotion, energy, and the ineffable into pure color and form.