Dated Web objects 1880-1919

Peggy Bacon

Date: 1919

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1996.59

Text Entries: One of Peggy Bacon's earliest prints, Dance at the League was executed shortly after she discovered a small printing press in the corner of a classroom at the Art Students League in New York, and began to experiment with drypoint. The print humorously commemorates a raucous "Bad News Ball" held by League students the same year and includes several portraits of Bacon's classmates. The Art Students League (significant in Bacon's personal history in that it was where her parents met and where she met her own spouse, the artist Alexander Brook) was founded in 1875 as a progressive, alternative source of artistic training to the exclusive National Academy of Design. During Bacon's student years there (1915-1920), realist artists such as Robert Henri, John Sloan and George Bellows served as instructors. Their interest in figure-based depictions of the contemporary American urban milieu ultimately shaped Bacon's oeuvre - more than five decades of prints and drawings satirizing modern life and human pretensions - as well.