Alice Bailly was one of Switzerland's most radical painters in the early decades of the 20th century. Bailly was born in Geneva, where she attended separate women's classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. She also studied in Munich. By 1906 Bailly had settled in Paris, the center of avant-garde culture; there she became friends with a number of modernist painters, including Juan Gris, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin. Bailly was in Paris exhibiting her early wood engravings, when the radical style known as fauvism first came to the fore. She was inspired by that style's bold use of intense colors, dark outlines, and emphatically unrealistic anatomy and space. In 1908 her new paintings hung at the Salon d'Automne alongside the art of the principal fauve painters.

At the age of 39, Bailly developed her own variation on an even more radical kind of art: cubism. In 1912 her work was chosen to represent Switzerland in a traveling exhibition seen in Russia, England, and Spain. When World War I broke out, Bailly returned to Switzerland, where she invented "wool paintings," mixed-media works in which short strands of colored yarn imitated brush strokes. She made approximately 50 wool paintings between 1913 and 1922 and received an award for them when they were displayed in Paris in 1925.

Bailly was briefly active in the dada phenomenon. She then moved to Lausanne in 1923 and stayed there the rest of her life, continuing to exhibit regularly and promote the cause of modern art. In 1936 Bailly accepted a commission to paint eight large murals for the foyer of the Theatre of Lausanne. This monumental task led to exhaustion, which presumably made Bailly more susceptible to the tuberculosis that claimed her two years later. Her will directed that the proceeds from the sale of her art be used for a trust fund to help young Swiss artists.