John Sloan
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THE ACADEMIC idealism of the American art world at the turn of the century was broken by a group of young realists, Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan and Everett Shinn, all Philadelphians, all close friends, all students of the Pennsylvania Academy, and all except Henri originally newspaper artists. Their leader was the oldest, Henri--brilliant, magnetic and a born teacher. He encouraged them to paint, he confirmed their bent toward the life around them, he opened their eyes to the great realists of the past, Velasquez, Hals, Rembrandt, Goya, Daumier and Manet.
Rebelling against academic sweetness and light, the Henri group turned to the life of the modern city (at first Philadelphia, later New York, where all of them settled). They loved the city as their nineteenth-century predecessors had loved the country. Their relish for low life, their satirical humor and their social conscience were new notes in American painting. And not only in their art did they combat academicism: for two decades they spearheaded the battle for artistic independence and against academic domination of the art world. In alliance with other progressive and modern artists, they were leaders in such events as the Armory Show.
John Sloan, next to youngest of the group and, with Glackens, the most gifted, was born in 1871 at Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, brought up in Philadelphia, and became a successful newspaper artist. Under Henri's influence he began to paint seriously when he was twenty-six; but his career as painter and etcher really started when he moved to New York in 1904, fell in love with the city, and became its leading realistic interpreter of the time.
Sloan's chief motivating force was his interest in human beings. He liked what was common, everyday and universal; he liked the places and occasions when people got together; he liked character, the humors of daily life, and the infinite variety of a great city. He preferred the masses to the upper classes. His art had
that quality of being a direct product of ordinary reality, authentic and full of flavor, that has marked the best genre art of all periods. He had a singularly true eye, and his style from the first was delightful in its fresh observation and racy graphic sense. Though his satire of wealth and pretence could be sharp, on the whole his was a kindly humor, without the bitterness of the following generation of social realists. His art was fundamentally affirmative, based on a deep and warm love of humanity--not in the abstract but in the individual. And he loved the city for itself, its moods in different seasons, weathers and times of day. With all his realism, he was a poet who found his beauty all around him, in the everyday life of city streets.
When Sloan was nearing sixty, an age when most artists are through with experimenting, he completely transformed his art--in subjects, style and technique. Abandoning the contemporary scene, he concentrated on the figure, and especially the female nude. His chief aim became the realization of sculptural form, using the technique of the old masters. These figure pieces of his last twenty years, though without the humor and human interest of his early work, were among the strongest plastic creations of our time in America; they have a sort of tough idiosyncrasy, and the solid existence that all lasting art has.
In his long, hard-working, often embattled life Sloan combined several careers: illustrator, painter, etcher, pioneer socialist, art editor of The Masses, chief organizer of early independent shows, perennial president of the Society of Independent Artists, and one of the greatest teachers of his generation. For many years before his death in 1951 he was a leading citizen of the American art world.
Sloan: Nature is what you see plus what you think about it. . . . The artist's mental image of the thing seen in nature, expressed in graphic terms, is what gives creative vitality to the work.
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