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.

DAVE CHAPMAN STAMP ISSUED

Carol Evans at the debut of Dave Chapman's stamp by the USPS.

On Wednesday, June 29, 2011, the US Postal Service officially debuted their Pioneers of American Industrial Design stamp pane at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

The ceremony started off with the Presentation of Colors by the High School of Graphic Communication Art Navy Junior ROTC and the singing of the National Anthem. Bill Moggridge, Director of the Cooper-Hewitt and inventor of the laptop computer, 1979, welcomed the audience and Jessica Helfand, Design Subcommittee Chair of the Citizen’s Stamp Advisory Committee said “It was a great day for design and designers.”

Of course, our favorite was the stamp featuring two sewing machines in streamlined elegance. They were designed by Dave Chapman (1909-1978) for the White Sewing Machine Company of Cleveland, in 1949. Chapman began his career at  Montgomery Ward and Company, and in1935 founded Dave Chapman Industrial Design. He was a president of the Society of Industrial Designers, a recipient of the Design Award Medal given by the Industrial Designers Institute, and a fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters. His papers are at Syracuse University.

Most importantly, to us, Chapman is also the father of our friend and years-ago Associated American Artists’ colleague Carol Evans.

The stamp pane features twelve designers.  There’s only one woman, Greta von Nessen, but it’s a wonderful group including Frederick Hurten Rhead who developed Fiesta Dinnerare, as well as Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, and Russel Wright.

These are forever stamps with short histories printed on the reverse, the peel off backs.

JUDITH SHAHN

Work by Judth Shahn is now in the Gallery.

             Judith Shahn, Beach Cabins (Cape Cod), about 1950.

The exhibition Judith Shahn, Early Work, 1948 to 1955, New York City, Cape Cod, Mexico, will be on view September 15 through October 8, 2011.

JOHN STORRS

John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist, is on view at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University, through July 9, 2011. There is a wonderful range of sculpture -- from cubist but still clearly figurative to stripped down, architectural-motif slices of stone. Of the drawings, several relate to commissions. As we were reminded in March, no visit to Chicago is complete without a sighting of Storr's Ceres, 1929, at the top of the Chicago Board of Trade Building.

John Storrs, Figure Reclining Under a Tree, 1918-20

Figure Reclining Under a Tree, 1918-20, is an unpublished illustration for Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. A wood engraving, 6 x 6, this subject was in the major retrospective, John Storrs, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986/87. 
 

Grey is also showing Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

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.

Last Day: DOROTHY BROWDY KUSHNER & ROBERT KUSHNER

May 25 is the last day of

DOROTHY BROWDY KUSHNER & 
ROBERT KUSHNER: 

RECONFIGURED FLORA

Dorothy Browdy Kushner (1909-2000) and Robert  Kushner (born 1949), mother and son: Paintings, fabric pieces, and drawings, from the 1930s to the 1970s for Dorothy and from the 1970s to 2000 for Robert.

The entire show may be seen under Exhibitions at WWW.SUSANTELLERGALLERY.COM

                          Gallery East Wall, May, 2011

 

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