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Guy Pène Du Bois

American, 1884 - 1958

Birth-PlaceBrooklyn, NY

Death-PlaceBoston, MA

BiographyGuy Pène du Bois (1884-1958)

Born in Brooklyn, Guy Pène du Bois was named after Guy de Maupassant, a friend of his father, Henri, who came from New Orleans. Throughout his life the artist maintained a strong connection to French culture (he did not speak English until he was nine), grounding his art in the sharp wit and keen alertness to social environment of his Gallic predecessors, Honoré Daumier, Jean-Louis Forain, and Théophile Steinlen. Yet like so many of his generation, Pène du Bois remained confident in the future of art in America, and his themes were inspired by a broad conception of the American scene, including depicting his countrymen abroad. Although he resided in France for some years, he never became a true expatriate.

Pène du Bois began his art studies at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase and also took classes from James Carroll Beckwith, Frank Vincent Du Mond, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. But it was the magnetic Robert Henri, with whom he began to study in 1902, who made the most powerful impression on his development, and this teacher's emphatic blending of art and life remained fundamental to Pène du Bois's aesthetic, both as critic and as painter. He made his first trip to Europe in April 1905, returning in July 1906 after his father’s death. Needing to earn a living, he worked as a writer and an editor for a series of newspapers and art periodicals. His writings, spanning over forty years, represent an articulate consideration of realist concerns grounded in the aesthetic of Henri's circle.

The art of Pène du Bois came to maturity during the 1920s. Although he had ended his studies in 1905, the necessity of earning a living as a critic and teacher meant that studio time was often limited. In 1913 John Kraushaar began to handle the artist’s work at his New York gallery, and in 1918 Pène du Bois had his first one-man show at the Whitney Studio Club. In 1920, in an effort to minimize the distractions of New York, he moved to Westport, Connecticut, though the town, with its active social life--F. Scott Fitzgerald was a neighbor--did not turn out to be the quiet painting refuge he had sought, and he continued to work in his New York studio. Not until December 1924, when he sailed for France, could he paint full time, freed from immediate financial concerns. The artist was forty years old.

His six years in France were the most sustained period of work he would ever have. Temporarily relieved from his obligations as a critic and supported by steady sales through Kraushaar Gallery, Pène du Bois could concentrate on his painting. During this period his style changed dramatically, as he abandoned the heavy brushtrokes and dark colors of his earlier works in favor of a broader conception of the human figure, using a lighter palette, simplified volumes, bold patterns, and larger canvases. Seeking his subjects in situations he knew well, his style remained solidly representational yet progressive.

Pène du Bois and his family occupied a rented house in Garnes, a rural village about thirty miles from Paris, where he visited regularly, seeking the companionship of other artists and subjects for his works. He was fascinated by the display of contemporary life and social relations he saw at the Café du Dôme and other public gathering places and closely studied Americans he encountered abroad. His substantially modeled and stylish figures are chic and sophisticated yet ultimately empty and superficial. His was an urbane view characterized by an underlying sharpness; Pène du Bois’s canvases of the 1920s established his reputation as one of America's most trenchant artists.

The stock market crash of October 1929 forced the artist to return to America in April 1930. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he continued exploring the figural interests that had long occupied him. Outside the studio he continued to write, teach, and exhibit widely. During the Depression he received government sponsorship for several New Deal murals, and he published his autobiography, “Artists Say the Silliest Things”, in 1940. That year he was also made a full member of the National Academy of Design. Increasing health problems throughout the late 1940s sharply curtailed his work, and by 1950 he had effectively ceased painting. Pène du Bois died in Boston, where his daughter Yvonne lived until her death in 1997.

“On the Bridge”, 1926
Oil on panel, 21 5/8 x 17 7/8 in. (54.9 x 45.4 cm)
Signed and dated (lower left): Guy Pène du Bois '26
Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1944.9)

The problematic relations between men and women were a source of continued fascination for Pène du Bois, and his canvases depict a variety of social situations in which a lack of communication between couples is a regular theme. Typical is “On the Bridge”, executed in France. In this canvas, a Parisian streetscape vignette, a couple stands together yet their emotional separation is evident. The man stares up the river toward another bridge, while his female companion gazes fixedly at the street. Their self-absorption bespeaks mutual estrangement, an impression reinforced by the chilly air around them, for the tree to their right is leafless, suggesting the barren quality of their relationship. Her fashionably thin dress and open coat provide her with little warmth.

While the cafés Pène du Bois painted are sometimes identified in the title, many of his streetscape scenes, such as “On the Bridge”, picture locales as a type rather than a specific place. Pène du Bois was fascinated by the American expatriates and visitors to France he observed in such public social situations. Typical is his “Americans in Paris” (1927; Museum of Modern Art, New York), in which four women briskly cross a bridge enroute to shopping or sightseeing. In contrast to those in the New Britain painting, the women in “Americans in Paris”, when liberated from their male companions, assume an energetic role focused outside themselves, not on the constricted conventions of male-female interaction.

BF

Bibliography:
Guy Pène du Bois, Artists Say the Silliest Things (New York: American Artists Group, 1940); Betsy Fahlman, “Guy Pène du Bois: Painter, Critic, Teacher,” Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1981; Betsy Fahlman, Guy Pène du Bois: Artist about Town, exhib. cat. (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1980); Betsy Fahlman, "Guy Pène du Bois: Painter and Critic," Art and Antiques 3 (November-December 1980): 106-13; Betsy Fahlman, Guy Pène du Bois: The Twenties at Home and Abroad, exhib. cat. (Wilkes-Barre, Penn.: Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes University, 1995).

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