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BORN IN PHILADELPHIA in 1870, Glackens like his friends Sloan, Luks and Shinn began as a newspaper artist, painting in his spare time under Henri's inspiring influence. After a year abroad in 1895 he settled in New York and became a successful free-lance illustrator. He was a born draftsman ( Sloan said "he could draw anything"), commanding a line that was keen, delicate and alive, and his illustrations rank among the best American graphic art.
His early paintings, as with the others of the Henri group, were reportorial: their subject-matter was New York. But whereas Sloan and Luks preferred the common life, Glackens inclined toward the upper levels of society. He liked elegant women, stylish promenaders on Fifth Avenue, Central Park with its carriages and children and nursemaids, night life in restaurants and roof gardens, and the whole spectacle of city life; and he painted all this with gaiety, style, a love of movement and color, and an incisive sense of character. Where Sloan had humor, Glackens had wit. Everything in his work was alive: basically graphic, it gave just the essentials; it proved that in paint as in words, brevity is the soul of wit. Charm is a much-abused word, but Glackens' early work possessed it, genuinely.
In their youth all the Henri group were in conscious revolt against impressionism--or rather what impressionism had become in America, pretty and academic. The style of their early work--bold, graphic, dark in palette, with prevailing grays, browns and blacks--was a return to what they felt was the truer realistic tradition of Velasquez, Hals, Goya, and the pre-impressionist Manet. Like the others, Glackens in early years deliberately restricted his palette to cool silvery grays and rich blacks, with only an occasional stronger note.
A turning-point in Glackens' career came with a visit to France and Spain in 1906, when his painting showed the obvious impact of Manet and Renoir. In the next few years his work went through basic changes. His subjects broadened out into landscape, figure-painting, the nude, still-life--the full range of the painter's immemorial themes. His art became an expression of pagan love of sunlight, summer, the human body, children, flowers. Everything was bathed in all-embracing light.
Abandoning the grays of early years, his color blossomed into the full impressionist gamut, used with an opulence rare in American art. His pictures, like those of his greatest admiration, Renoir, seemed drenched in color. But his style never entirely lost its graphic character--its observation, vivacity and sense of movement. By contrast with the academic American followers of impressionism, who exploited its naturalistic side, Glackens belonged in its more creative current, which led to postimpressionism and the modern movements.
After his early years Glackens was blessed with an assured income and could devote himself to his great love, painting. He went abroad many times and worked much in France, especially in the South. In the fight for artistic independence he played a quiet but effective part, as chairman for selection of American works for the Armory Show, and as the first president of the Society of Independent Artists. Before his death in 1938 he had received many awards and honors.
Glackens: "Artists say the silliest things about painting."
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