ABSTRACT
The painter Alice Halicka was born with the family name Rosenblatt, the eldest daughter of a wealthy Jewish physician from Cracow. Halicka painted the Self-Portrait just after her marriage to her compatriot Ludwig Markous, the cubist painter from Warsaw who, following the encouragement of Guillaume Apollinaire. At the very end of her life Halicka disclosed the even more devastating effects of Marcoussis's discouragement upon her cubist production. Warnod, as interviewer and life-long friend of the artist since the days that her father, the art critic André Warnod, had endorsed her early work, concluded that Halicka simultaneously had been "compliant" and "too independent" to continue to paint like her husband, and so she consequently "changed her style and forgot her cubism". It seems that Halicka was "compliant" to the extreme of self-effacement, and consequently felt she had no choice but to acquiesce to the demands of her overbearing husband either by hiding or destroying her work.
