Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel

In 1921, New York newspapers declared artist Ethel Wallace (1886-1968) a pioneer a batik portraits, the “newest rage in art,” and Vogue Paris described her portraits as “personal and original” and “modern and unexpected” in its July issue. Wallace also created designs for fashion, and her adaptation of batik, a Javanese method of dyeing cloth, became a coveted trend among New York’s elite in the 1910s and ’20s. Her clothing designs and batik paintings aligned with the feminism of the New Wo...