By Victor Greto
WILMINGTON – There is a terribly matter-of-fact quality to the New York work of early 20th-century painter John Sloan.
This is not to say that Sloan doesn’t show us a world that is long gone.
Because it’s turn-of-the-20th-century New York City, the people are dressed differently, more formally. Even the prostitutes wear frilly white, and in one painting a Greenwich Village woman in a red kimono hanging her laundry out on the rooftop, clothespins in her mouth, wears pumps. The men wear hats and suit jackets and smoke a lot. So do the women, for that matter – smoke a lot, that is.
But there’s nothing startling or alien about the subject matter, nor about its dark-hued intimacy.
That’s because Sloan’s instinctive working-class aesthetic – and that of other “Ash Can” artists from around the turn-of-the-20th-century, including its most famous, later, exponent, Edward Hopper – has become our own.
That aesthetic, fed by the rise of daily newspapers, the cinema and a burgeoning working- and middle-class, eventually came to permeate American culture by the mid-20th century.
At the time, however, Sloan couldn’t sell a painting, and most critics were either shocked or simply uninterested.
Sloan’s vision is a camera-like, encompassing gaze aimed at the daily lives and gritty, crowded streets of lower Manhattan.
More than 40 of Sloan’s New York City paintings, mostly from the two decades after he moved to the city from Philadelphia in 1904, are on display this weekend through Jan. 20 at The Delaware Art Museum.
“Seeing the City: Sloan’s New York,” altogether contains 100 works, including drawings, prints and photographs. The exhibit has been augmented by loans from other museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.
But it’s the collection of the Delaware Art Museum itself – more than 5,000 of Sloan’s works, from paintings and sketches to diaries and photographs representing all stages of his career – that gives the show depth. It also informs a fine accompanying catalog of essays and reproductions of Sloan’s work.
“We had to decide what we wanted to do,” says Joyce Schilling, the museum’s curator, when she considered the focus of the exhibit.
That’s because of the diverse wealth of material the museum holds. During Sloan’s long life (1871-1951) he produced a lot, including portraits, cityscapes, landscapes, illustrations and prints.
The artist’s second wife, Helen Farr Sloan, who began donating papers to the museum’s library in 1961, moved from New York to Wilmington in 1989. In 1996, she donated to the museum all of the works of art owned by the John Sloan Memorial Foundation and most of the works owned by the Helen Farr Sloan Revocable Trust.
Aside from paintings, much of the work included all of her husband’s books, diaries and other paraphernalia.
Because of the extent and amount of gifts given to the museum since the 1960s, the museum re-named its library the Helen Farr Sloan Library & Archives in 1985.
In May, the museum announced it received its largest cash bequest in its history when Sloan’s estate – she died in Dec. 2005, at the age of 94 – gave the institution $6,850,000.
Along with associate curator Heather Campbell Coyle – who was hired four years ago to help create this exhibit – Schilling put together the show and a fine exhibition catalog containing their introduction to Sloan’s work, as well as several essays by art historians.
Schilling and Coyle decided the exhibit, about which they consulted Helen Farr Sloan, would concentrate on his greatest work: his early New York days.
Along with his paintings, the exhibit also shows Sloan’s letters to his wife and his colleagues; photographs he took of street scenes; illustrations he drew for magazines, including McClure’s and The Masses, a Socialist publication; and diary entries where he talked of walking the streets and finding subjects to paint every time he turned a crowded corner.
In one diary entry, dated May 24, 1907, Sloan wrote, “Walked today, and, at a distance, shadowed a poor wretch of [a] woman on 14th St. Watched her stop to look at billboards, go into Five Cent Stores, take candy, nearly run over at Fifth Avenue, dazed and always trying to arrange hair and hatpins. To the Union Square Lavatory. She then sits down, gets a newspaper, always uneasy, probably no drink as yet this day.”
Sloan was no stranger to big cities.
Although born in Lock Haven, Pa., in 1871, his family moved 200 miles west to Philadelphia when he was 6. After he turned 16, his father lost his job, so Sloan got one at a downtown bookstore. It was there where he began reading his older contemporaries, from Walt Whitman and Victor Hugo to Emile Zola.
He also studied the prints of Honoré Daumier and William Hogarth, and began copying them, as well as prints by older masters such as Rembrandt.
Most of the subjects of these artists were “ordinary” people.
As Sloan later wrote, “I am a realist, working in the tradition of Daumier, Courbet, Rembrandt, and Carpaccio. I am more interested in the noble commonplace of nature than in the curious: believing that form and color are tools of the artist’s imagination in re-creating life.”
Sloan also soon befriended other like-minded, budding artists, including the older Robert Henri, Everett Shinn and William Glackens. They, with others, eventually called themselves “The Eight,” a group of like-minded painters later derogatorily labeled the “Ash Can School” because of their gritty subject matter.
When he turned 20, Sloan became an illustrator for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He worked there for more than a decade. During that time, he grew as an artist and painted several street scenes of Philadelphia, included in the museum’s catalog, such as “Independence Square, Philadelphia” from 1900, and “East Entrance, City Hall, Philadelphia,” from the following year.
But after he lost his job (photography was usurping illustrations in newspapers) in 1903, he moved to New York City, believing he could support himself as a freelance illustrator.
He did, just barely. But during his daily perambulations of Lower Manhattan, and while simply gazing outside his window, first on West 23rd Street in Chelsea, and later in Greenwich Village, he produced the greatest work of his life.
“He’s not born there, and he really knows nothing of New York when he moves there,” Schilling says. “How did he get to know it?”
As one of the catalog’s essays insists, he came to know New York through a “pedestrian aesthetic,” a scholarly way of saying that Sloan grew intimate with the city by walking and keeping his eyes open.
However you put it, it’s correct.
“Sloan is always at street level,” says Coyle. He shows you what he’s seeing, neither looking up nor down. And, just as much, he’s level with what he’s seeing from the window of his apartment.
Several exemplary paintings in the exhibit include 1907’s “Election Night” – a raucous crowd scene at Herald Square, framed by an overhead El train adding to the excitement and noise of waiting for election returns. The viewer is at eye-level, focused on the central figure of a woman in a red dress.
“Six O’clock, Winter” from 1912 more prominently features an El train, but the view of the crowd of people waiting are cut off at the torso, making you feel as though you are bustling through the crowd. It’s twilight, and the darkened blue sky earns as much space in the painting as the people and the diagonally-drawn swoosh of the train.
“Three A.M.,” from 1909, shows two women talking in a cramped apartment. One, in a white nightgown, a slipped strap slung over her right arm, and whose hand is holding a cigarette, is cooking on the stove. The other, sitting and drinking from a coffee cup, is fully dressed, cheeks heavily rouged, and speaking.
They’re probably prostitutes, trading notes about their evening. Sloan actually submitted this work for an annual exhibition. It was rejected.
The year before he painted this work, he had shown his art with “The Eight,” at an exhibition that was derided by critics.
In 1910, Sloan joined the Socialist Party and began illustrating for its main publication, The Masses. He moved south from Chelsea to Greenwich Village in 1912, and became part of the Bohemian scene of the time, associating with the likes of playwright Eugene O’Neill and journalist John Reed.
By 1915, he had moved to 88 Washington Place, and his art began to change.
He already had expanded his muted-color palette, using a brighter color scheme first introduced by a contemporary Italian painter named Maratta. And a distance began to grow between himself and the people on the street.
The creative process behind his 1917 work, “Jefferson Market,” a geometric, red-hued view of Sixth Street looking north from the Village, is shown in the exhibit, including sketches he made of the picture, and a meticulously planned color scheme.
Just as important is the fact that the subject of the painting is seen from afar and on high. The few tiny human figures in the picture are relegated to the bottom right; even the El train seems dwarfed by Sloan’s perspective.
As the 1920s come, Sloan’s work becomes more distant; he even plays with skewed perspectives. His later canvases do not have the intensity of his earlier ones.
Two ending paintings in the exhibit are indicative of the change: 1922’s “The City From Greenwich Village” feels almost hellish as one looks south from on-high over a darkened Village, an El train, and toward downtown and Wall Street in the upper left, glimmering in contrast like an emerald city. To the right is the Varitype Building, where Sloan had lived until 1915.
It’s a coda on his early work.
Two years earlier, he already had painted the last word with “Cornelia Street.” Here, the view is just to the right of the his old digs, but the gaze is gentle. The time is sunset, and one senses, perhaps for the first time, a feeling of nostalgia for a moment that is irretrievably past. Even the birds scattering from the roof of the Varitype seem to be leaving for good.
“Seeing the City: Sloan’s New York” shows an artist at his peak. And it also points both to the triumph of a future aesthetic, and an ongoing economic plight.
If Sloan’s values are on display in the subject matter of his paintings, so are they in his unrelenting dark and muted view of that life.
If the pictures themselves often are not pretty to look at, it’s because Sloan’s gaze is compassionate; it’s a gaze that knows the how and why of the conditions of the city streets.
For the best years of his artistic life, John Sloan couldn’t turn away from what he saw.
Now, it’s our turn.