|
About John Sloan
The brilliant member of the *Ash Can School, the great graphic artist who contributed to The Masses, and chronicler of modern urban life, John Sloan, left an immense and impressive oeuvre but for our purposes, was more of a *post-impressionist after rejecting the "prettiness" of impressionism, as one of the Eight. He stated specifically that his paintings around 1907 "show my resistance to the impressionist influences." (Sloan, 1939, p. 215). Lloyd Goodrich (Lloyd Goodrich Papers, AAA, reel 688) questioned Sloan further and reported, "it was more the whole spirit of impressionism, its sweetness, prettiness, the emphasis on effect [that he objected to]." From Lock Haven, James Dixon Sloan and Henrietta Ireland Sloan moved their family to Philadelphia in 1876, the year of the *Centennial Exposition. John and his one-year old baby sister *Marianna would have been too young to appreciate any art that they might have seen there but their parents encouraged both children to pursue the arts. In 1887, John had to leave school after his father’s stationery business failed. John worked for a book and print firm named Porter and Coates where he was able to handle original etchings by Dürer and Rembrandt, and soon he taught himself that technique, using Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s Etching and Etchers (1876) as a guide. The bookstore sold Sloan’s copies of etchings for five dollars each (Loughery, 1995, p. 12). Then for about a year, John worked as a graphic designer for A. E. Newton, where he executed a set of etchings of Westminster Abbey.
In the fall of 1890, Sloan entered the Spring Garden Institute to study drawing; a Self-portrait from that year survives, an oil painted on a window shade (Delaware Art Museum), which is a very matter-of-fact, frontally posed portrait. Sloan left Newton’s to work as a free-lance illustrator and in 1892, he was hired by the Philadelphia Inquirer, a dynamic Republican newspaper, while his old high school friend, *William Glackens was employed by the Philadelphia Press. Sloan also took classes at the *Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Charles Grafly (1862-1929), both a painter and a sculptor, who had studied with *Thomas Eakins. At Grafly’s Christmas party of 1892, Sloan met *Robert Henri, who was teaching at the *Philadelphia School of Design for Women, while continuing to study at the Academy. In the following March, unhappy with *Thomas Anshutz for leaving for Paris, and desiring more experience drawing the nude model, as well as lower tuition, some of the PAFA students formed the Charcoal Club. Members drew after the nude three nights a week, and every Monday night, Henri critiqued others’ works. Henri, the group’s president, explained to Grafly in an undated letter (Beinecke Rare Book Room, Yale University) that in no way were they trying to rival the Academy. Some students simply wished to supplement their practice of drawing. The Charcoal Club, where Sloan served as secretary, also had a social role. There was entertainment, in addition to small banquets (Homer, 1969, p. 73).
After the short-lived Club disbanded that fall, Henri opened his studio once a week as a kind of progressive salon, where the *Philadelphia Artist-Reporters Group, future members of the Eight, met to form the nucleus of the modern American realist movement. Henri also initiated a summer school at Darby Creek in May of 1893 and in July, he was teaching at Avalon, New Jersey. That September, Sloan and Henri were sharing a studio. But Sloan could not share Henri’s enthusiasm for Paris, where the latter spent all or part of the next seven summers. Sloan would never be tempted to visit Europe at all, but he was not immune to European influence. Some of his illustrations and posters of the 1890s are heavily imbued with Art Nouveau stylization. In late 1895, Sloan left the Inquirer for the slightly more liberal Philadelphia Press, where Glackens, *George Luks, and *Everett Shinn were working. Also, probably in 1895, Sloan executed Landscape — Impressionist (John Sloan Trust), which Elzea (1991, cat. no. 4) calls "Sloan’s only experiment with anything like impressionist technique." He may have been inspired by Henri’s tentative impressionism — works such as Girl Seated by the Sea (Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Collection) — which predated the future Ash Can members’ conversion to the *Velázquez-Hals-Manet inspired dark palette. Curiously, Sloan’s landscape has more of a broad, abstract post-impressionist look and recalls *Cézanne’s House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise, ca. 1873 (Musée d’Orsay), which, however, Sloan could not have seen.
In the fall of 1897, Sloan helped Henri to set up his first one-man show at the Pennsylvania Academy. Sloan, himself had produced very few paintings in the preceding two years; his own debut exhibition would be in 1900 at the *Art Institute of Chicago, where his Old Walnut Street Theater (John Sloan Trust)
was accepted. At the same time, his Independence Square, Philadelphia (Private collection) was hung at the Carnegie Institute’s annual exhibition. Sloan left the Philadelphia Press in 1903 when they reduced the number of illustrators on their staff, after turning to a syndicated Sunday supplement. The Eight’s "pre-debut," in January of 1904 at the *National Arts Club included Sloan’s Independence Square and The Sewing Woman (Metropolitan Museum of Art). While Charles de Kay (New York Times, 20 January 1904) predicted a succès d’estime based on the latter work, *Arthur Hoeber (New York Commercial Advertiser, 21 January 1904) only saw "an animated corpse, though it is well drawn."
That April, Sloan and his wife Dolly moved to New York; Henri helped out by finding him a studio in the *Sherwood Studio Building and by lending him money. Sloan was greatly stimulated by the area around their apartment on West Twenty-third Street, where Fifth Avenue promenaders were only a few blocks away from a motley array of "bouncers, pimps, pickpockets, patrolmen on the take, neighborhood kids playing in the street [and] the clatter of the El. . . ." (Loughery, 1995, p. 75). Sloan’s circle at that time included Henri, Glackens, Shinn, Luks, *Ernest Lawson, Jerome Myers, Frederick James Gregg, and Charles FitzGerald, both of The Sun, and James Moore, the bon vivant pictured in Glackens’s Chez Mouquin (Art Institute of Chicago), who owned the Café Francis, reportedly "New York’s Most Popular Resort of New Bohemia." Sloan also frequented McSorley’s Tavern for an occasional glass of ale.
All of this urban excitement inspired Sloan’s early paintings and his set of thirteen etchings that form the "New York City Life" series; here are depicted socialite snobs riding down Fifth Avenue, young ladies playing at the Nickelodeon, and apartment dwellers on a hot summer night, in the age before electric fans and air conditioners, who find the roof is the only place to sleep in comfort. From the same year (1905) is Sloan’s
The Coffee Line (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh), an urban winter night scene that recalls Henri’s spontaneously brushed images of Paris. It reportedly represents thirty-some unemployed men waiting in line for a cup of coffee (Elzea, 1991, cat. no. 63). There is some debate concerning Sloan’s empathy with such *subject matter. While some, like Elzea, paint Sloan as a detached observer, Snyder and Zurier (in Zurier, Snyder, and Mecklenburg, 1995, p. 110) remind us that the artist was a dedicated socialist who showed more sympathy for the poor man than the "idle rich," and Loughery (1995, p. 144) points out how "the extent of the visible poverty in Manhattan was also troubling to him, even shocking." Sloan’s involvement with The Masses offers more evidence that the artist was no mere objective, distanced visual reporter. On the other hand, some members of the editorial board of The Masses criticized some of Sloan’s contributions — for example, The Return from Toil (1913) — as not biting enough. His cover for the June 1914 issue, however, illustrated a striking worker firing on his oppressors, the National Guard, while holding a dead child, one of their innocent victims. Sloan actively supported socialist candidates, created posters for party events, and supported workers’ rights to strike. Still, overall, Sloan insisted on artistic quality over propaganda and would leave the magazine in 1916.
Sloan accepted an offer to teach one day a week at the Art Students League in Pittsburgh, in October 1907, a position that lasted only a few months, owing to the school’s irregular salary payments. Meanwhile, Sloan had been meeting with his colleagues to organize a special exhibition that would finally bring public attention to their cause, one where the Eight received the label "The Ash Can School." At this momentous show, which opened at *Macbeth’s Galleries on 3 February 1908, Sloan had seven paintings, including Easter Eve (Collection of Edward and Deborah Shein), Nursemaids, Madison Square (Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln), and Hairdresser’s Window (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut). Sloan explained in his diary that he felt too shabbily dressed to attend the exhibition’s opening (Sloan, 1965, p. 191). Not one of his works sold. Critics differed widely, from offering praises to expressions of bewilderment. The story of this exhibition has been covered adequately by various art historians and does not need to be reviewed here.
Sloan participated in another even more monumental exposition, the *Armory Show of 1913 by serving on the hanging and catalogue committees and by submitting five etchings and two oil paintings, McSorley’s Bar (Detroit Institute of Arts) and Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair (Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy). Sloan was no modernist but he understood the significance of the show, whose organizers suddenly deemed Robert Henri to be conservative. Sloan protested to *John Quinn that A. B. Davies (who devised a timid, half-hearted form of modernism) had excluded Henri from the Committee on Domestic Exhibits. Although the tide was turning to modernism, it was Henri’s disappointment in not being able to "run the show" that led to his demise. His art was, of course, no more conservative than Sloan’s. For both Henri and Sloan, Matisse’s Blue Nude (Baltimore Museum of Art) or Othon Friesz’s Bathers (Museum of Modern Art) would have been astonishing for their bold use of color and form but in addition, their formalism was probably incomprehensible to an Ash Can School realist who insisted on depicting modern life. Among the Eight, only *Prendergast, Davies, and Glackens approached the de-emphasis of subject matter that so characterized modernism.
Meanwhile, Sloan was becoming less dependent on Henri, and even though the Armory Show’s modernist bomb’s "detonation" did not seem to have an immediate effect on Sloan, there were more decorative and abstractly conceived works conceived already in 1915, such as Apple Tree (John Sloan Trust). Moreover, fewer urban scenes were undertaken and more landscapes, single figures, and nudes appear, as "L’Art pour l’Art" seems to have taken over Sloan’s former preoccupation with proletarian struggles and everyday life. Sloan’s renewed interest in landscape painting coincided with his first summer in *Gloucester in 1914 (see Holcomb, 1980). He and Dolly shared a red cottage with other New York painters for five summers. Goodrich (1952, p. 50) pointed out that Sloan’s coming to Gloucester signified "his first extended experience in painting outdoors." Sloan’s plein-air painting was not spontaneous, however, as one might expect. He prepared a limited palette beforehand, as opposed to being inspired by nature.
Having seen *Van Gogh’s fourteen works in the Armory Show, Sloan became more experimental with color. It seems fair
to say that Sloan’s palette lightened by the time he visited Gloucester. On first glance, the painting Dolly Reading (Private collection) looks like an impressionist canvas with its sunny atmosphere, broken brushwork, and its unconstrained manner. The brushwork is actually more Expressionistic and has nothing to do with *Claude Monet’s scintillation of juxtaposed colors. Sunflowers, Rocky Neck, also in a private collection, is another famous image from the same summer (1914). The dynamic brushwork on the large rock in the foreground contrasts with the more descriptively painted sunflowers, while Main Street, Gloucester (1917; New Britain Museum of American Art) recalls Sloan’s earlier New York urban scenes. Sloan’s Cape Ann experience emphasizes variety and experimentation.
Sloan began teaching full-time at the Art Students League in 1916. Students remember Sloan’s fulminating against institutional and commercial art and his integrity as a teacher (Loughery 1995, pp. 223-224). More flirting with modernism followed in 1917 when Sloan became involved with the *Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition at the *Grand Central Art Galleries, the group’s premiere show. Sloan exhibited two works, Reddy in a Tree (John Sloan Trust) and Blonde Nude (Bowdoin College Museum of Art), both from 1917. While the boy in the tree reeks of homely *naturalism, the studio nude is in a contrived, twisted pose that would delight Cellini or even Bronzino in its manneristic inventiveness. But compared to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (his famous but lost "ready-made" porcelain urinal), both of Sloan’s works were démodé. In fact, La Fontaine was rejected by the hanging committee of what was supposed to be a jury-free show. The scandal was amplified even more when Glackens, the group’s president, carried the found object behind a screen and "accidentally" dropped it (Glackens, 1957, pp. 187-188). Sloan became the Society’s president in the
following year, with *Arthur Wesley Dow as vice-president. From the exhibition of 1920, Sloan made a poster that showed a woman painting on the coast of Gloucester (Marlor, 1984, p. 15). Sloan remained president until 1944, when the Society disbanded for various reasons.
From Gloucester, Sloan turned his attention to Santa Fe, first in 1919. He would become a promoter of American Indian art and a defender of Native American religious practices, which had always been suppressed by the dominant Christian institutions and by the police. Sloan was following other artists and intellectuals who had discovered the colorful Southwest. In the 1880s, artists such as Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953) were there, and *Frederic Remington first visited New Mexico in 1897, while Ernest Leonard Blumenschein (1874-1960) went there to do an illustration for McClure’s. Oscar E. Berninghaus (1874-1952), who began spending summers in Taos in 1899, would become a founder of the Taos Society of Artists in 1915. Carlos Vierra (1876-1937) became Santa Fe’s first resident artist in 1904. When New Mexico gained its statehood in 1912, Sharp moved permanently to Taos. Henri and Jan Matulka (1890-1972) discovered Santa Fe in 1916, when *Julius Rolshoven began a two-year stay in the region. Santa Fe’s Museum of Fine Arts opened in 1917, the same year that marked *Leon Kroll’s and *George Bellows’s visits to the city and Georgia O’Keeffe’s arrival to new Mexico. *Marsden Hartley reached Santa Fe a year before Sloan did; in addition, *Andrew Dasburg was invited to Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1918.
Therefore, Sloan, though no pioneer in the Southwest arts movement, arrived relatively early, two seasons before the founding of Los Cinco Pintores, in 1921, and well ahead of the 1920s modernists — Raymond Jonson, D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Stuart Davis, Paul Strand, and John Marin. The Sloans bought a house in Santa Fe in 1920. Besides promoting American tribal culture, Sloan suggested American Indian art might replace French as a source of inspiration, thinking also that perhaps the elemental, geometric forms of the landscape and the clear desert atmosphere and bright colors might engender a modern American expression. The Southwest experience resulted in a "greater attention to composition and design [in his own work], heightened color sense, and awareness . . . of the identical visual stimuli that informed the painting of his ‘modernist’ counterparts." (Udall, 1984, p. 154). To dispel the myth that Sloan was only a genre painter of New York City, one need only look at his magnificent, expansive Southwest landscapes, such as Little Ranch House of 1926 (John Sloan Trust) or Chama Running Red, of the previous year (Anschutz Collection).
In the remainder of Sloan’s career, the female studio nude would be the artist’s major preoccupation. Many of these figures feature an overall hatching or "striping," which is the graphic artist’s way to indicate modeling. The painter’s famous Gist of Art, published in 1939, is basically a technical book for aspiring artists and has become a valuable record of the artist’s working methods. After Dolly’s death in 1943, Sloan remarried a student, Helen Farr, in Santa Fe. Goodrich (1952, p. 76) described Sloan as a kind of old "enfant terrible . . . . He never lost his youthful energy and alertness, his sense of fun and his great capacity for the enjoyment of life."
REF.
Caffin, 1907-A, pp. 372-373; Yeats, 1917; Roberts, 1919; Hopper, 1927; Jackman, 1928, p. 279; Gutman, 1929-B; LaFollette, 1929, pp. 305-306, 324-325; "Andover Traces Career of John Sloan," 1938; Sloan, 1939; Landgren, 1940, pp. 90, 96, 102-104; Saint-Gaudens, 1941, p. 202; Pagano, 1946, cat. no. 111; Breuning, 1948; Larkin [1949], pp. 332-336; Art Students League, 1951, pp. 28-29; Goodrich, 1952; Watson, 1952; Brooks, 1955; Richardson, 1956, pp. 362-364, 368, 372; Sloan, 1965; Art Students League, 1967, pp. 104-105; Morse, 1969; St. John, 1971-A and B; Hoopes, 1972, pp.124-125; Phillips, 1973, vol. 2, pp. 84-86; Young, 1973, pp. 42-61; Art Students League, 1975; O’Gorman, 1976, pp. 71-75; Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art, 1976, pp. 444-446; Wilmerding, 1976, pp. 171-172; Brown et al, 1978, pp. 357-359; Holcomb, 1978; Perlman, 1979; Holcomb, 1980; David W. Scott, in Encyclopedia of American Art, 1981, pp. 519-521; Holcomb, 1983; Sims, 1984, pp. 74-75; Udall, 1984, pp. 151-154; Preato, Langer, and Cox, 1988, pp. 16, 37, 63, 83; Echoes of Revolt, 1989; Gerdts, 1990, vol. 3, p. 165; Hills, 1990; Elzea, 1991; Milroy, 1991; Beck, 1992; Gerdts, 1992-B, cat. no. 73; Strazdes et al, 1992, pp. 429-430; Gerdts, 1994, pp. 18-20, 33, 104, 119, 122-123; Weinberg, Bolger, and Curry, 1994; Loughery, 1995; Zurier, Snyder, and Mecklenburg, 1995; Haskell, 1999, pp. 61-68, 91-92; Davies, 2001, pp. 80-81; Ilene Susan Fort, in Encyclopedia of American Art before 1914, 2000, pp. 468-469. |
Paintings by John Sloan
| New York, New Haven & Hartford Yard, Coaling House |
| oil on canvas: 12 x 16 inches |
| signed: lower left |
|
| |
Click Picture to Enlarge
|
|
