John Sloan (1871 – 1951)
Posted by M.R.N. on February 17, 2013
A Woman’s Work
Carol With Red Curls
Jeanne Dubinsky
Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair
Sixth Avenue Elevated At Third Street
The Cot
Scrubwoman
Sleeping Nude On Lavender
Gateway To Cerillos
Music In The Plaza
Daisy
Nude At Piano
Sun And Wind On The Roof
South Beach Bathers
Six O’Clock, Winter
Helen At The Easel
Nude, Red Hair, Standing
My Wife In Blue
The Lafayette
Travelling Carnival, Santa Fe
Juanita
Spanish Girl – Fur Hat – Red Coat
Monument In The Plaza, New York
Sunday Afternoon In Union Square
El Gallo
Katherine Schon
Nude
Yeats At Petitpas
Self-Portrait
Self-Portrait (Pipe And Brown Jacket)
George Eliot
7 Responses to “John Sloan (1871 – 1951)”
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AMERICAN GALLERY 
Henryk Fantazos said
One is struck looking at Sloan’s art how often he employed those diagonal slashes,as if made with wire brush.Flaunting disregard for actual form of human body is also a discomforting.Look at the reclining nude he painted-if women really looked naked that bad no painter would ever paint them.Well-I know:it was the post-impressionism epoch and a well-informed, fashionable artist was supposed to exaggerate and distort .The effect is miserable.
Bruce said
It’s odd, but although I find myself agreeing with Henryk (I tend to favor realism in art and the musculature of Lavender’s body and the mannish arms and hands of Juanita bother me) but for some reason, when I step back a bit I find this artist’s style to be pleasing overall.
Bruce said
By the way, if you think the Yeats in “Yeats At Petitpas” is the famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats, you would be off by a generation and a continent. The Yeats shown here is John Butler Yeats, William’s father, a portraitist who “was a poor businessman and was never financially secure. He moved house frequently and shifted several times between England and Ireland. At the age of 69 he moved to New York, where he was friendly with members of the Ashcan School of painters.”
He apparently became the philosophical leader of a group of artists who hung out in a small restaurant called Petitpas on West Twenty Ninth Street in New York City. His group of friends included John Sloan.
I found an interesting New York Times article from February 1922 about this Yeats. Quoting from it, “John Sloan, the painter, and perhaps the closest of Yeats’s many friends, once asked him why he decided to stay [in America]. ‘Because I saw a hopeful penury ahead instead of a hopeless,’ he answered. Yeats also had remarked that he did not expect to go home and live the life of father to a famous son, that he still was ‘the head of the dynasty,’ and would remain just that.”
For an interesting glimpse of this man, his circle of followers, and his times, go to this web page and click View Full Article: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60A12FE355810738DDDA00994DA405B828EF1D3
Or, if you are lucky, go directly to the article at: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F60A12FE355810738DDDA00994DA405B828EF1D3
Bruce said
Reading that article again, I find a role model for myself. My future self.
Suzay Lamb said
In fact I’d tagged “Yeats at Petipat” with W. B. Yeats… Thanks for lifting this veil of ignorance from me 🙂
Bruce said
Let me go back to Sloan himself for a minute (and sorry for the multiple comments but this was one of those posts that the more I looked at, the more I got into it).
If you isolate and group “A Woman’s Work,” “Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair,” “Sixth Avenue Elevated At Third Street,” “Sun And Wind On The Roof,” “South Beach Bathers,” “Six O’Clock, Winter,” “The Lafayette,” (but not the two park paintings for some reason; they look vaguely European to me) as well as four other works that I found elsewhere: “McSorley’s Bar,” “Wake of the Ferry,” “Hairdressers Window,” and “The Haymarket,” you have an excellent look at everyday life in New York City at the beginning of the 20th Century. All are now in my collection.
From Wikipedia about John French Sloan: . . . 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 humaneness, 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.”
Well, gee. No wonder I liked this artist’s style. Edward Hopper is one of my favorite painters of all.
Bruce said
Heh, there’s more out there. Take a look at this one which I think is titled “14th Street at Sixth Avenue”: http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/n/images/newdeal_sloan.14thst6thave.jpg
But I will stop talking now. Don’t want to wordpress my luck! 😉