Djuna Barnes shows up in Midnight in Paris

Peggy Bacon would have been so pleased to see her pal Djuna Barnes featured in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Now showing, the film opened May 11 in Cannes, of course.  Barnes (1892-1982), the American modernist writer, was part of Bacon’s Greenwich Village crowd, and figures in Bacon’s Off with Their Heads, published in 1934.

This drawing of Barnes was in our April show of Bacon's Drawings and Prints.

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

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

               Peggy Bacon, The Pet (Of Course, They All Wanted the Cat), 1919

In one of the earliest works in the show, Votes for Women, 1915, Bacon places her feminist on a platform labeled Babbit’s Lye, standing her on an authentic soapbox.  Women as bathing ”Beauties of Nature,” 1942, morph into Mexican matrons in shawls in the 1976 -- sixty years of applying a sharp eye to her surroundings.

Bacon studied at the New York School of Applied Design for Women in 1913 and at the Art Students League in with George Bellows, John Sloan, and Kenneth Hayes Miller from 1915 to 1920. Although based in New York City she spent extended periods in Woodstock, NY, and Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Over the years her prints and drawings ranged from charming to shrewd to caustic.

In the brochure for the exhibition, Between the Wars, Women Artists of the Whitney Studio Club and Museum, 1997, curator David W. Kiehl wrote “Peggy Bacon… ranks… among the greatest American delineator of human personality of the period.”

Bacon contributed to Vanity Fair, the New Masses, and The New Yorker, and illustrated more than 60 books, many her own and many for children. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 1934. Her work is in permanent collections throughout the country.

Additional highlights of the show are the drypoints, Hard of Hearing, 1933, that appeared in the New York Worlds’ Fair, 1939, and an artist’s proof of Aesthetic Pleasure, 1936, with extensive annotations in the artist’s hand.

                                   Peggy Bacon, Hard of Hearing, 1933

 

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

 

The Chicago Print and Drawing Fair

Peggy Bacon, Votes for Women, 1915

The Chicago Print and Drawing Fair is currently on view in the Yates Gallery of the Chicago Cultural Center, March 17 through March 20, 2011. Fourteen dealers are showing, all International Fine Print Dealers Association members. At this fair we are featuring works by women: Peggy Bacon (in advance of our April show), Riva Helfond, Anne Ryan, and Marguerite Zorach. Will Barnet, James Daugherty, Howard Daum, Peter Grippe, and Hugh Mesibov, round out the group.