People

Although painted in France, where Guy Péne du Bois and his family lived from 1924 to 1929, "People" explores the artist's continuing fascination with contemporary American society, both at home and abroad. Du Bois frequently explored themes of the loneliness of the crowd through the representation of upper-class sitters who are active in the world, yet still solitary. in this large painting, the artist literally widened his scope. A group of fashionably dressed men and women stand at the edge of an enigmatic semicircular space. But for all the sense of community that such a gathering entails, the obliqueness of the narrative, combined with the painter's characteristic sculptural modeling that renders their features indistinct, gives the scene an impersonal, potentially disturbing aura. Raised in an old Louisiana Creole family transplanted to New York, du Bois studied with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, an experience that committed him to representational art. Although hostile towards abstraction, du Bois's works, with their hard edges and massive forms, nevertheless flirt with modernist styles. A teacher himself, notably at his own school in Stonington, Connecticut from 1932 to 1950, du Bois was also an active art critic, as well as a memoirist.