John French Sloan

Biography

In the spring of 1888, his father experienced a mental breakdown that left him unable to work, and Sloan became responsible, at the age of 16, for the support of his parents and sisters. He dropped out of school in order to work full-time as an assistant cashier at Porter and Coates, a bookstore. His duties were light, allowing him many hours to read the books and examine the works in the store's print department. It was there that Sloan created his earliest surviving works, among which are pen and ink copies after Dürer and Rembrandt. He also began making etchings, which were sold in the store for a modest sum. In 1890, the offer of a higher salary persuaded Sloan to leave his position to work for A. Edward Newton, a former clerk for Porter and Coates who had opened his own stationery store. At Newton's, Sloan designed greeting cards, calendars, and continued with his etchings. In that same year he also attended a night drawing class at the Spring Garden Institute, which provided him his first formal art training.

He soon left Newton's business in quest of greater freedom as a freelance commercial artist, but this venture produced little income, leading him in 1892 to take a job in the art department at The Philadelphia Inquirer where he worked as an illustrator. Later that same year, Sloan began taking evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the guidance of Thomas Pollock Anshutz. Among his fellow students was his old schoolmate William Glackens.

at Third Street (New York City) by John Sloan. Oil 30 x 40. 1928. ]]

At a Christmas party in 1892, Sloan met Robert Henri, a charismatic advocate of artistic independence who became a mentor to him. Henri encouraged Sloan who eventually was convinced to turn to painting. They were lifelong friends, shared a common artistic outlook, and together promoted a new form of realism that helped to redefine American Art.

Towards the end of 1895, Sloan decided to leave The Philadelphia Inquirer to work in the art department of The Philadelphia Press. His schedule was now less rigid, allowing him more time to paint. Henri offered encouragement, and often sent Sloan reproductions of European artists, such as Manet, Hals, Goya and Velázquez. The two were married on August 5, 1901, providing Sloan with an affectionate partner who believed in him absolutely, but whose lapses and mental instability led to frequent crises.

By 1903 he had produced about sixty oil paintings in total. and for such journals as Collier's Weekly, Good Housekeeping, Harper's Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and Scribner's.

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A doctor who was consulted in an effort to help Dolly overcome her drinking problem suggested a scheme to Sloan: he was to start a diary in which he would include his fondest thoughts of her, with the expectation that she would surreptitiously read it and be freed of her disabling fear that Sloan would leave her. Spanning the period from 1906 to early 1913, the diary soon grew beyond its initial purpose, and its publication in 1965 supplied researchers with a detailed chronicle of Sloan's activities and interests.

Sloan's growing discontent with what he called "the Plutocracy's government" led him to join the Socialist party in 1910. He became the art editor of The Masses with the December 1912 issue, and contributed drawings to other socialist publications such as the Call and Coming Nation. As Sloan disliked propaganda, his work for these magazines often lacked overt political content. This was unacceptable to a faction of his fellow editors at The Masses, causing him to resign his position with the journal in 1916. He later became disenchanted with the Communist Party in America, although he remained hopeful that the Soviet Union would succeed in creating an egalitarian society.

In 1913, Sloan painted a huge backdrop for the Paterson strike Pageant. The play, a benefit performance for the striking silk mill workers, took Place in Madison Square Garden, and incorporated over 1,000 actors.

In February 1913, Sloan participated in the Armory Show. He served as a member of the committee that organized it, and also exhibited two paintings and five etchings. In that same year, the important collector Albert C. Barnes purchased one of Sloan's paintings; this was only the fourth sale of a painting for Sloan (although it has often erroneously been counted as his first). For Sloan, exposure to the European modernist works on view in the Armory Show initiated a gradual move away from the urban themes he had been painting for the previous ten years. In 1914–15, during summers spent in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he painted landscapes outdoors in a new, more colorful style influenced by Van Gogh and the Fauves.

Beginning in 1914, Sloan taught at the Art Students League, continuing for about ten years. Sloan also taught briefly at the George Luks Art School. His students respected him for his practical knowledge and integrity, but feared his caustic tongue; as a well-known painter who had nonetheless sold very few paintings, he advised his students, "I have nothing to teach you that will help you to make a living".

The summer of 1918 was the last he spent in Gloucester. For the next 30 years, he spent four months each summer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the desert landscape inspired a new concentration on the rendering of form. Still, the majority of his works were completed in New York. He developed a strong interest in Native American arts and ceremonies, and became an advocate of Indian artists. He also championed the work of Diego Rivera, who he called "the one artist on this continent who is in the class of the old masters." The Society of Independent Artists, which Sloan had co-founded in 1916, gave Rivera and José Clemente Orozco their first showing in the United States in 1920.

Sloan's early paintings may have been influenced by Thomas Eakins as a result of his time studying under Anshutz at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1893, Sloan and Glackens became regulars at a weekly "open house" at Henri's studio, where he led discussions of such books as George Moore's Modern Painting and William Morris Hunt's Talks on Art. "Both Eakins and Moore emphasized the importance of life in art, one of the ideas Henri is credited with having passed on to the young newspaper artists." Unlike Henri, Sloan was not a facile painter, and labored over his work—leading Henri to remark that "Sloan" was "the past participle of 'slow'". When Glackens and Sloan were at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Glackens usually got the reportorial assignments because he was more adept than Sloan in making quick sketches. This was a major characteristic of his style, consistent with the Ashcan School's goal of presenting a subject to the viewer with all the immediacy of a snapshot.

Sloan tended to observe city life and dwellers interacting in an intimate setting as they interact. He "concerned himself with what we call genre: street scenes, restaurant life, paintings of saloons, ferry boats, roof tops, back yards, and so on through a whole catalogue of commonplace subjects." Like Edward Hopper, Sloan often used the perspective of the window in his painting, in order to focus closely, but also in order to observe the subject undetected. He wrote in his diary, in 1911 ; "I am in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it ... No insult to the people you are watching to do so unseen." Sloan's attention to isolated incidents within the urban environment recalls the narrative techniques used in the realist fiction and Hollywood films he enjoyed.

Legacy

His students included Alexander Calder, Reginald Marsh, Peggy Bacon, Aaron Bohrod, Barnett Newman, and Norman Raeben. In 1939 he published a book of his teachings, Gist of Art.

In American Visions the critic Robert Hughes praised the influence of "the most lyrical, and politically acerbic of the Ashcan artists, 'a spectator of life', as he called himself. Sloan's work had an honest humane-ness, a frank sympathy, he refused to flatten lower-class New Yorkers into stereotypes of misery, and his strong sense of the moments in which ordinary people are seen unawares, or isolated, was to deeply affect the leading artist of the next generation, Edward Hopper."

The lobby of the United States Post Office (Bronxville, New York) features a mural by Sloan painted in 1939 and titled "The Arrival of the First Mail in Bronxville in 1846." The post office and mural were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

Category:1871 births Category:1951 deaths Category:American etchers Category:American painters Category:American printmakers Category:Artists from New Mexico Category:Artists from Pennsylvania Category:Faculty of Art Students League of New York Category:Modern painters Category:Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts alumni Category:People from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Category:People from Santa Fe, New Mexico Category:Taos Society of Artists