Moon Lady makes clear Bailey’s awareness of Egyptian culture and his determination to preserve a sense of an ancient heritage’s ambiguous modern remainders. She wears her hair in the form of the white miter, the royal headdress of Upper Egypt. Her body is a remarkable reconciliation of the expressionism of Bailey’s Dancers and Egyptian pictorial canons of two-dimensional, “mural” or “frieze” notation. (Bailey seldom incorporated Egyptian motifs into his paintings.) This queen and all her power and knowledge, only shows herself in the moon and in the light it symbolizes.
