William H. Bailey (November 17, 1930 – April 13, 2020) was an American artist mostly known for his contemporary still life paintings.
Bailey was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa. While growing up in various cities throughout the Midwest, he developed a love of drawing. He studied art at the University of Kansas, Yale University and Yale School of Art where he studied with Josef Albers and received his MFA in 1957.
In an art scene with rising popularity of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism, Bailey ultimately decided to pursue a different artistic path. Fascinated by European Old Masters and classic Greek sculpture, the artist have chosen to evolve to a meticulous depictive style which he applied to his contemplative still life paintings. “When my work changed around 1960, I was thinking, ‘There’s so much noise in contemporary art. So much gesture,’” he told Yale News in 2010. “ I realized it wasn’t my natural bent to make a lot of noise, and I’m not very good at rhetorical gesture.”
Gathering together everyday objects, like teacups, bowls, vases, pitchers and eggs, and letting them rest on plain wooden tables with undecorated monochromatic backgrounds, Bailey was able to create timeless compositions immersed in aura of quietude and mystery.
Bailey’s first solo exhibition was held at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont in 1956. In following years his work was exhibited in various museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. In 1968, Bailey held a solo show at Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in Manhattan, a gallery that would exhibit his works regularly until 1990. In 1970 he was included in a major survey, “Twenty-two Realists,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. After 2005, he was represented by the Betty Cunningham Gallery.
The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Bailey taught drawing and painting classes at Yale from 1957 until 1962, when he took up teaching duties at Indiana University in Bloomington. In 1969, he returned to Yale, going on to serve as the Dean of the School of Art (1975–76), the Kingman Brewster Professor of Art (1979–95), and the Kingman Brewster Professor of Art Emeritus (1995–2020).
William Bailey’s work is included in major private and public collections, such as Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and museum of American Art in Washington D.C.