Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Peggy Bacon & Her Circle



Peggy Bacon, Going Fishing, 1952 (Wellfleet, Cape Cod)



Isabel Bishop, Noon Hour, 1935 Alexander Brook, Rosalie Hook (Mrs. Robert Gwathmey), 1940
Peggy Bacon & Her Circle was on view at the Susan Teller Gallery from July 13 through August 18, 2011. There are paintings and works on paper from 1918 to 1952. Bacon studied at the Art Students League in with George Bellows, John Sloan, and Kenneth Hayes Miller from 1915 to 1920. It was there she met Alexander Brook; they were married from 1920 to 1940. 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. Bacon contributed to Vanity Fair, the New Masses, and The New Yorker magazines and illustrated more than 60 books, many her own and many for children. Her famous book of caricatures, Off with Their Heads, was published in 1934, and also she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 1934. Her work is in permanent collections throughout the country.