Whitney's Breaking Ground on view through September 18

The Whitney’s Breaking Ground show closes September 18.

It is such a stunner -- everything looks wonderful.  The Edward Laning 1931 painting of 14^th Street is an entire universe.  The Alexander Brook and the Isabel Bishop are just beautiful. (Bishop modern before she was consciously modern). Peggy Bacon, 

Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Fiene, Katherine Schmidt, Arthur B. Davies, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Georgina Klitgaard  (Mrs. Kai Klitgaard), Katherine Schmidt, Marguerite Zorach, and Max Weber, are just a few of the others in the show.

Peggy Bacon, Going Fishing, 1953

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.

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.