Dance at the League

Made at the outset of Peggy Bacon's successful career as an illustrator and printmaker, Dance at the League is a spirited depiction of boisterous merriment at the "Bad News Ball" of the Art Students League, New York's premier progressive art school from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The party seems more rowdy free-for-all than polite social occasion, as Bacon caricatures fellow artists and friends by exaggerating their poses and elongating their arms and legs to exceedingly lanky proportions. She includes a depiction of herself (in the center of the top row of figures) dancing with the long-armed Edmund Duffy (1899–1962), later a noted editorial cartoonist, who served as editor of the Bad News, the League students' parody publication; Bacon herself was its assistant editor. The man in the foreground wearing a top hat and with arms akimbo is Lloyd Goodrich, former fellow art student who would eventually emerge as a champion of American art and author of seminal studies of major American artists. Amid the dancing couples, artist Richard Dyer (dates unknown) holds a chair threateningly overhead. The seated man at left, partially obscured, is painter Alexander Brook (1898–1987), whom Bacon married in 1920. Their son Alexander Brook Jr., born in 1922 and known as Sandy, is probably the recipient of this inscribed impression.

Using strong outlines and modeling the forms through series of tightly spaced fine lines and dense cross-hatching, Bacon created this image in dramatic contrasts of light and dark softened by the slight blurriness of individual lines typical of drypoint etching. The artist's preference for sharp angles and elongated, smoothly cylindrical forms complements her satirical take on the scene she records, an orchestrated chaos of almost doll-like figures intertwined and overlapped in the joyous tumult of the gathering.

L'Amérique et les Modernes, 1900–1950 (American Moderns, 1900–1950), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, July 25–October 31, 2000. [exh. cat.]

(Re)Presenting Women, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, October 16, 2001–January 13, 2002.

Le Temps des loisirs : peintures américaines (At Leisure: American Paintings), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–October 31, 2008.

Peggy Bacon, Personalities and Places. (exh. cat., National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution). Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975. No. 25, p. 98; cat. 82, pp. 14–15.

One Hundred Prints by 100 Artists of the Art Students League. (exh. cat., Associated American Artists). New York: Associated American Artists, 1975. No. 5, p. 19; ill. p. 38.