A Fickle Art World: Fame and Legacy in Modern Art
Guy Pène du Bois
Opera Box 1926
Oil on linen
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The opera remains a favorite subject for Pène du Bois throughout his career. A scene of urban sophistication and "high culture," the opera gave Pène du Bois a chance to have his hand at a subject matter that so enticed the French Impressionist artists of the previous century. Further, like the Impressionists before him, when one looks at any of Pène du Bois' opera-centered paintings, the subject matter is less the opera or the performers than it is the pretenses put on by the opera attendees themselves. Painted during his second "expatriate" sojourn in France, this time as an older artist decamping to Garnes (about 30 miles from Paris) with his family during Prohibition, Opera Box is a fantastic representation of Pène du Bois' mature and most recognizable style - and of his talent for depicting female figures.
Men may sit beside women in an opera box or dine with them at a café, but, in the world of Pène du Bois, women are the figures that give his paintings their character. It is also Pène du Bois' women - like the figure here, dressed all in white and peering out from her loge seat - who help shape the Pène du Bois style for which he becomes known. While in his portrait work Pène du Bois showcases his strong eye for rendering individualized faces and figures with thought-filled minds, in his thematic works of the 1920s the "sophisticated" women (and men) in his paintings like Opera Box typically have inscrutable, impenetrable doll-like faces. Putting on airs and masking their true characters, they appear more unreal than real, less like animated, living beings than like mannequins or puppets whose artifice now permeates their beings. Indeed, in 1938, on the occasion of a 30-year retrospective of Pène du Bois' work, the New York Times refers directly to the by-then-recognizable "Parisian mask" put on by the artist's figures in the 1920s.
A Fickle Art World: Fame and Legacy in Modern Art
Guy Pène du Bois
Opera Box 1926
Oil on linen
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The opera remains a favorite subject for Pène du Bois throughout his career. A scene of urban sophistication and "high culture," the opera gave Pène du Bois a chance to have his hand at a subject matter that so enticed the French Impressionist artists of the previous century. Further, like the Impressionists before him, when one looks at any of Pène du Bois' opera-centered paintings, the subject matter is less the opera or the performers than it is the pretenses put on by the opera attendees themselves. Painted during his second "expatriate" sojourn in France, this time as an older artist decamping to Garnes (about 30 miles from Paris) with his family during Prohibition, Opera Box is a fantastic representation of Pène du Bois' mature and most recognizable style - and of his talent for depicting female figures.
Men may sit beside women in an opera box or dine with them at a café, but, in the world of Pène du Bois, women are the figures that give his paintings their character. It is also Pène du Bois' women - like the figure here, dressed all in white and peering out from her loge seat - who help shape the Pène du Bois style for which he becomes known. While in his portrait work Pène du Bois showcases his strong eye for rendering individualized faces and figures with thought-filled minds, in his thematic works of the 1920s the "sophisticated" women (and men) in his paintings like Opera Box typically have inscrutable, impenetrable doll-like faces. Putting on airs and masking their true characters, they appear more unreal than real, less like animated, living beings than like mannequins or puppets whose artifice now permeates their beings. Indeed, in 1938, on the occasion of a 30-year retrospective of Pène du Bois' work, the New York Times refers directly to the by-then-recognizable "Parisian mask" put on by the artist's figures in the 1920s.