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Throughout the decade when post-Impressionism was establishing itself in America, and the following decade, there were painters who adhered to official or historical authority. Their work is of many kinds and styles, but they may be grouped as New Traditionalists, since they are guided in the use of paint and the arrangement of subject by influences which have been handed down variously from Renaissance Old Masters. They believe in the adequacy of historical art for contemporary purposes, and in the unbroken evolution of painting in the Western world, in opposition to the modernists and abstractionists, who see the old stylistic and technical precedents ended, or ending, and new ones being formed under the influences of the new age.
John Sloan, an associate of Robert Henri, and many of Henri's students, including Bellows, Speicher, Du Bois, and Hopper, are of this group.
After study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, John Sloan worked as a professional illustrator and thus acquired the facile and expressive line which has made his etchings so distinctive a contribution to the progress of the graphic arts in the United States. He has often caught the dramatic overtones of social change. His sympathetic insight into the lives of all kinds of people-particularly everyday, rather humble people--under the impact of these changes, together with the trenchancy of his humor, has suggested Daumier, Guys, and even Hogarth as among his antecedents. The spirited observation and the imaginative participation of this artist are apparent in his most recent paintings of the everyday scene, particularly the New York scene, as they are in the early McSorley's Bar ( Detroit Institute of Arts) and the Dust Storm on Fifth Avenue (Metropolitan Museum).
His painting of this order is an antecedent of "American Scene" art. But it is the pictures which he began painting about 1907, including The Old Clown Making Up ( Phillips Memorial Gallery), Three A.M., Picnic Ground, and The Wake of the Ferry, that best represent Sloan as the artist of color. In all of these pictures, there is a Whistlerian distinction of design (and in some of them, including especially The Wake of the Ferry, there is a suggestion of Whistler's influence). Detail has been drastically eliminated for strengthening the emphasis on the central motive. At one time, his figures had a robust, Courbet-like heartiness and naturalism, while his female nudes of recent years are Renoir-like in rosiness. He has painted under many influences, but it is always his sincerity and individuality that assert themselves and establish the final character of the painting.
George Bellows died an untimely death in 1925, after he had given promise of maturing into a personality to dominate an epoch. In 1910, an independent artist group, an outgrowth of The Eight and the immediate forerunner of the Armory Show, exhibited in a building on East Thirty-Fourth Street, New York. Helen Appleton Read recalls that prize-fight pictures brought by the youthful Ohioan caused consternation greater than that which was to be aroused in 1913 by Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase. In The White Horse, the Crucifixion, and some of the portrait studies of his family, Bellows revealed an innate power to use paint with a fine technical mastery. In industrial landscapes and other scenes taken from the rapidly changing American background, there is an original structural force which appears to have been part of the spontaneous product of the moment's emotional experience of the scene. Although he had not achieved the final synthesis of style and power, he remains a figure of outstanding importance.
Eugene Speicher has been widely accepted by a conservative public as America's foremost painter, and as a leader among men whose work is notable for the excellence of its drawing and for the elegance of its paint surface. He has produced a notable gallery of young American women. He delights in developing these portrait studies in rich and sensuous color and enriching them with decorative pattern, but the character of the sitter is always of primary concern to him. "I am very sure that the portraits of Speicher are very resemblant," Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., wrote in his monograph on this artist, in the Whitney Museum series, noting that there is a moral as well as an aesthetic quality in all these feminine forms, forms which Speicher makes a symbol of human dignity. "These young women would act well in delicate emergencies," Mr. Mather is certain.
Speicher has lived in New York and Woodstock and has painted continuously for over thirty years. His credo he expresses thus: "To communicate to others through the medium of drawing or painting what feelings and sensations I have about life and natural phenomena, hoping a warm and unique work will be the result." He sees in the present activities of art, a process at work by which we are moving away from provincialism, crudeness, the factual, and the obvious. "There is a growing awareness of color subtlety, creative drawing, richness of design, vitality of the form of the canvas, and self-reliance on our reactions to our environment," he says, adding, "I believe that the future will have more favorable conditions for the full development of vital and sensitive artists, artists who are cultivated and have clear perceptions and adequate knowledge of their craft to express themselves fully."
Edward Hopper (born 1882) and Guy Pène Du Bois (born 1884) are neighbors and friends of long standing, and they produce painting which is interesting for the contrasts represented in subject and approach. Each had established his own individual style long before 1913, and neither has shown marked divergence from that style. Edward Hopper sold his first canvas, a little painting called Sailing, as a result of its exhibition at the Armory Show. He had already been painting street scenes in small towns, railroad tracks and trains, and old houses, not unlike his recent paintings that have given his name a conspicuous place in discussions of "American Scene" art.
The Hopper subjects have usually been clearly and concisely outlined, and their natural aspects emphasized. More recently, they are painted in an atmospheric envelope of strong, fused color, which is romantically suggestive and is an aid to the growing simplification and restraint of naturalistic detail noticeable in his work. In Ryder's House, The Circle Theatre, and Cape Cod Afternoon (which was the first-prize winner at the Corcoran biennial exhibition in Washington in a recent year) this tendency is particularly noticeable. Hopper is a painter of empty houses, haunted with a sense of the past, as in the pictures of American "Gothic revival" residences, or with vague human associations. Even his stifling city apartments, his restaurants, and often his street scenes speak more eloquently of the places than of the people.
Guy Pène Du Bois arrived early at an amazingly precise language of pictorial criticism. He studied with Henri, but it was as a student in Paris that he achieved the brilliant Forain-like style which he has used so effectively as a weapon with which to puncture the complacency of mediocre people, the vulgar, the rich, the stupid. The public and social life of the world to which he returned to take up his professional work was filled with targets for his hatred, disdain, and satirical mirth.
Du Bois is of aristocratic ancestry and of a French New Orleans background. His father was a literary man. The son became an able writer and art critic as well as a social commentator in paint. His observations of life and art have all been made with Gallic intellectuality and objectivity. He once said that the artist must not forget that he is a man watching a parade. The unflattering view which he often took of it in his youth is still apparent in occasional work, as Mr. and Mrs. Middleclass, a small mural of the thirties, evidences. Carnival Interlude and Portrait of an Old Woman are among his expertly painted contemporary works.
"Any Old Master is better than any modern," this artist has said, placing himself with the upholders of a renovated and simplified traditionalism.
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