New York Times Review of Bacon & Circle Show

In the New York Times review of the Peggy Bacon & Her Circle show August 5, 2011, Holland Cotter wrote about the “distinctly geeky male students lurking in the background” of Bacon’s 1918 drypoint, Lunch at the League, with Dorothy Varian and Doris Rosenthal.

                              Peggy Bacon, Lunch at the League, 1918

He also noted that George Bellows, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan, teachers at the League, are represented in the show along with Isabel Bishop, Minna Citron (he called her depiction of childbirth a kind of “Titian-esque allegory”)

and Alexander Brook (with a portrait of Rosalie Hook – the photographer and wife of Robert Gwathmey).

  

In conclusion Cotter wrote, “All of the colleagues in the circle traced here are now gone, though shows like this ensure that their link with history, however slender, will not be broken.”  

We are thrilled, of course.

The show is on through August 18, 2011.

Link for site:

http://www.susantellergallery.com/cgi/STG_exh.pl

Peggy Bacon & Her Circle

JULY 13 THROUGH AUGUST 18, 2011

 Peggy Bacon, Close Quarters, 1932, (shipboard cabin, Bacon is at sink)

Peggy Bacon & Her Circle is on view at the Susan Teller Gallery from July 13 through August 18, 2011. There are paintings and works on paper from 1919 to 1952.

Bacon attended the Art Students League from 1917 to 1920. It was there she met Alexander Brook; they were married from 1920 to 1940. She studied with George Bellows, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan. Bacon taught at the League in 1935-36 and from 1948 to 1952.

For most of her career Bacon lived in the East Village or Greenwich Village neighborhoods of New York City. She spent extended periods in Woodstock, NY, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the coastal region of Maine, to which she moved in 1961. Many of her fellow students and neighbors became close colleagues, including Isabel Bishop, Minna Citron, Wanda Gag, Kai Klitgaard, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and his wife Katherine Schmidt, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, Dorothy Varian, and Marguerite Zorach.

 Kai Klitgaard, Abstract Tondo (or Monster in Tondo), 1930, ink drawing, 3 inches in diameter.

 

Bacon's book of caricatures, Off with Their Heads, was published in 1934.

Peggy Bacon: Drawings and Prints, 1915 to 1976, through Saturday, April 30

On view this weekend through next, the Peggy Bacon show runs through Saturday, April 30.  From crowd scenes to relaxing felines, no one does it like she does!

For My Dear, 1950, embroidery

Artist, draftsman, caricaturist, author, teacher, and maker of embroidered love letters, Bacon played a key role in twentieth century American art history. She hit the New York hot spots of Greenwich Village, The Art Students League (where she studied with John Sloan, George Bellows, and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and met Alexander Brook, her husband from 1920 to 1940), and Union Square. She worked in the artists’ colony of Woodstock, NY, in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, and in Washington, DC, portraying statesmen for Fortune Magazine. She could be witty and clever, but was always charming and gracious.

The entire show may be viewed under Exhibitions or Current at WWW.SUSANTELLERGALLERY.COM