Peggy Bacon - Artistic Career

Artistic Career

Bacon had always been interested in art and from a very young age her early artistic interests were encouraged and supported by her parents, but Bacon did not receive formal training in art until after graduating from Kent Place School. At the end of 1913, Bacon first studied art at the School of Applied Design for Women but disliked it calling it, "the prissiest, silliest place that ever was." She transferred after a few weeks to the School of Fine and Applied Arts on the West Wide where she took classes in illustration and life drawing. During the summer of 1914 Bacon attended Jonas Lie's landscape class in Port Jefferson, Long Island.

From 1915-1920 Bacon studied painting with Kenneth Hayes Miller, John Sloan, George Bellows and others at the Art Students League. While at the League, Bacon became friends with several other artists. Her circle of friends and acquaintances included Dorothea Schwarz (Greenbaum), Anne Rector (Duffy), Betty Burroughs (Woodhouse), Katherine Schmidt (Kuniyoshi Shubert), Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Molly Luce, Dorothy Varian, Edmund Duffy, Dick Dyer, David Morrison, and Andrew Dasburg. Looking back at her time at the League Bacon said, "The years at the Art Students League were a very important chunk of life to me and very exhilarating. It was the first time in my life, of course, that I had met and gotten to know familiarly a group of young people who were all headed the same way with the same interests. In fact it was practically parochial." Around 1917 Bacon became interested in printmaking and taught herself drypoint as there was no one teaching etching at the Art Students League at the time. Bacon's first caricature prints were featured in single-issue, satirical magazine Bad News, which was published by Bacon and her fellow art students in 1918. Drypoint was Bacon's primary medium until 1927. Although Bacon had trained as a painter, she eventually became famous for her satirical prints and drawings.

In the summer of 1919 Bacon studied with Andrew Dasburg in Woodstock, New York. That same summer she was engaged to American painter Alexander Brook and the two married on May 4, 1920. After marrying, Bacon and Brook moved to London for a year, where their daughter Belinda was born. When they returned, the family divided their time between Greenwich Village in New York City and Woodstock, New York, two vibrant artist communities. In 1922 a son, Sandy, was born in Woodstock. In 1940 Bacon and her husband divorced.

Bacon was a very prolific artist. In 1919, at the age of 24, she wrote and illustrated her first book, The True Philosopher and Other Cat Tales. She went on to illustrate over 60 books, 19 of which she also wrote, including a successful mystery book, The Inward Eye, which was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award in 1952 for best novel. Bacon's popular drawings appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, New Republic, Fortune, and Vanity Fair and she exhibited in galleries and museums frequently. Bacon had over thirty solo exhibitions at such venues as Montross Gallery, Alfred Stieglitz's Intimate Gallery, and the Downtown Gallery. In 1934 Bacon was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative work in the graphic arts. During her time as a fellow she completed 35 satirical portraits of art world figures for a collection called Off With Their Heads!, which was published that same year by Robert M. McBride & Company. In 1942 she was granted an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1980 the Academy awarded her a gold medal for her lifelong contribution to illustration and graphic art. In December 1975, the National Collection of Fine Arts, now the National Museum of American Art, honored Bacon with a yearlong retrospective exhibition titled, "Peggy Bacon: Personalities and Places."

In addition to her artistic career, Bacon taught extensively during the 1930s and 1940s at various institutions, including the Feildston School, the Art Students League, Hunter College, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC, and summers at the School of Music and Art in Stowe, Vermont.

In the 1970s Bacon's eyesight began failing and she eventually went to live with her son, in Cape Porpoise, Maine. She died in 1987 at the age of 91 in Kennebunk, Maine.