Burlesque is related in theme and composition to Benton’s New School for Social Research mural project America Today of 1930-31 and may have served as a study for it. The theatrical scene expresses the artist’s new interest in contemporary urban life, first demonstrated in Bootleggers, 1927 (Reynolda House, Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina) and expanded in America Today. Benton was fond of depicting burlesque dancers and strippers and wrote nostalgically of a Fourteenth Street theater where the strippers "used to make the old boys drool at the mouth and keep their hands in their pockets" (An Artist in America, p. 269).
The burlesque dancer -- with her vigorously thrusting elbow, head, and buttocks -- is similar in gesture to the cavorting performer in the upper-right corner of the City Activities panel in the America Today mural. In the finished mural Benton omitted the audience since all the mural images are only fragmentary scenes, one overlapping another, arranged to convey the hustle and bustle of twentieth-century American life. While Benton presented a more complete view of a theater in Burlesque, the easel painting shares with the mural panels a similar compositional approach: the theater interior is arranged in segmented groupings, the stage, orchestra, balcony, and boxes conceived as irregular shapes that fit together. Moreover, the large, arcing forms of the stage and balcony in the museum’s painting echo the decorative molding that divides various scenes in the mural.
