From a large family of scholars, Alice Halicka took painting lessons with Simon Hollósy in Munich before moving to Paris in 1912. There, she attended classes with Paul Sérusier and Maurice Denis at the Ransom Academy and began exhibiting her work in Parisian Salons. Her sojourn in France was punctuated by several trips to Austria, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, and Morocco. In 1923 she married a fellow Pole, the painter and engraver Ludwig Markus, known as Louis Marcoussis, and began to socialise with the cubists. Her participation in the 1914 Salon des indépendants brought the notice of Guillaume Apollinaire. During the First World War, she realised cubist still lifes (Composition cubist avec violon et partition musicale, 1919) before returning to figuration. Her artistic career was put on hold after L. Marcoussis returned from being stationed in Poland during the war, and appears to have dissuaded her from signing a contract with the gallerist Lépold Zborowski. However, during and after the inter-war period, she exhibited at the Salon d’automne, the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon des Surindépendants, as well as at several international group exhibitions (Berthe Weill, Paris, 1921; Mansard Gallery, London, 1922; Bernheim Jeune, Paris, 1923; Kunsthaus, Zurich, 1926; George Petit, Paris, 1930; René Gimpel, New York, 1936; Wildenstein, Paris, 1947; Collette Allendy, Paris, 1948).

Beginning in the 1920s, she dedicated herself primarily to “extra-pictorial” exploration: in 1924 at the gallery Fermé la nuit, she presented Romances captionnées, works in relief combining painting, sewing, collaged paper, and assemblages of fabric, buttons, wire, and feathers. She created designs for textiles and wallpaper for companies such as Dumas, Bianchini and Rodier, as well as costumes and masks for international balls (for Brunelleschi in 1913 and forCount of Beaumont in 1938). She also realised studies for the advertisements of Helena Rubinstein products in the United States between 1935 and 1938, and illustrated literary works by Valery Larbaud and Israel Zangwill. In 1978 the Valery Larbaud cultural centre in Vichy organised a joint retrospective of works by A. Halicka and L. Marcoussis.