Country Club Dance

The theme of the dancing couple ties this image to other prints Phil Hanson produced the same year: a series of individual couples in small intaglio editions (approximately 6 prints each). (See Smart Museum 2001.578f.) The theme and his treatment of it illustrates in part the impact that comic strips and cartoons had on Chicago Imagists, but more particularly it shows his interest in medieval art, similar in its two-dimensional depiction of volume and space to comic strips. (See 1973.40.)

All of his prints (etchings, aquatints and mezzotints) were printed in the intaglio class of Vera Berdich (1915‒2003) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where Hanson studied, and where he was also Berdich’s assistant. (See 2001.575.) Like Suellen Rocca, Jim Nutt, and other emerging Chicago Imagists who studied with her, he mastered print techniques under her expert guidance, but became better known as a painter in his maturity. Hanson often individually hand-colored a limited number of his prints, much like Jim Nutt, although Nutt’s raucous sense of humor was entirely unrelated to Hanson’s romanticism. This print of Country Club Dance is the only known hand-colored impression. (Other examples of Hanson’s prints colored by hand are 2001. 245-247, 2001.634, 1992.69, 2001.247.)