The World of Peggy Bacon

April 28–September 2, 2001

The installation of about 30 drawings and prints by the American artist Peggy Bacon (1895–1987) includes book illustrations, preliminary studies for prints, her earliest drypoints, as well as etchings from the 1920s and 1930s. Known for her witty and often devastating caricatures of family and friends, Bacon depicted people and places drawn from her own life experience. Bacon’s prints, drawings, and paintings document and satirize social events, domestic rituals, and the New York art world. She frequently used cats or other animals as metaphors to represent the “follies and foibles“ of humankind. Many of the works in this exhibition belonged to Carl Zigrosser, the director of the Weyhe Gallery in New York from 1919 to 1940 and the first curator of prints and drawings at the museum, from 1940 until 1963. Zigrosser promoted Bacon’s work, and many of the prints in this exhibition are inscribed to him.