Four Arts Ball (Bal des quatres arts)

Painted during the artist’s last year in France, this canvas by the American Guy Pène du Bois illustrates the annual masquerade ball held each summer to celebrate the end of the school year for art academies in Paris. Large Parisian dance halls would be overrun with thousands of local and foreign students dressed in elaborate and inventive costumes.

This image seems to suggest the final hours of celebration, as exhausted figures recline in the foreground. In the center of this disquieting environment, a couple—perhaps the artist and his wife, Flo—dance, alienated from the implied promiscuity that swirls around them.