Geneva Harbour or Flight of Gulls

Alice Bailly painted this a year after the First World War stranded her in Switzerland. Born in Geneva in 1872, she had built a career in Paris among the city's experimental painters and counted the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay as friends. When war broke out on 2 August 1914 the borders closed and she had to settle in Geneva, cut off from that circle. Swiss audiences were not ready for her: her Cubist exhibition of 1913 and her solo show at the Musée Rath met real resistance in French-speaking Switzerland, where the critic Paul Budry was almost the only writer defending such work. Instead of painting the lake the way the celebrated Ferdinand Hodler did, she used her own manner, built out of Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism — three movements that between them broke with natural colour, broke objects into planes, and tried to put motion into a still picture. The result treats a familiar Swiss view as something restless rather than calm. Bailly went on to invent a technique she called wool painting, using coloured yarn in place of brushstrokes, and died in Lausanne in 1938.