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John Sloan: Painter and Rebel

Name: John Sloan: Painter and Rebel
Author: John Loughery
ISBN: 9780805028782

by John Loughery

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Overview

As a member of "The Eight," a group of artists who challenged the anachronistic dictates of the Academy, John Sloan was a passionate chronicler of the untidy realities of urban American life, who believed that "character is everything in art" and that "a national character can only be acquired by remaining at home and saturating ourselves in the spirit of the land until it oozes from our pores and pencils." And in this vivid account we learn that there was another reason for the young artist to stay home: to help create the political and intellectual ferment that would define bohemian life in New York during the period of labor unrest before World War I and, a decade later, when the values of Whitman and Emerson (and Sloan's own circle) would be challenged by those of George Babbitt and Jay Gatsby. Close to the artist in these pages is his tempestuous wife, Dolly, friend of Emma Goldman and perennial backer of left-wing causes. Inside the circle we meet John Butler Yeats, a man "with the courage to listen to his heart"; Max Eastman and Floyd Dell of The Masses, whose landmark Socialist magazine the Sloans helped to found (John Sloan's rude, raw drawings were as blistering as the prose of Eastman or Jack Reed); John Quinn, the lawyer and collector; Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and supporters such as Juliana Force in New York and Mabel Dodge in Santa Fe (one of Sloan's adopted homes); and artists as disparate as Marcel Duchamp, Marsden Hartley, and Edward Hopper.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In 1904, realist painter John Sloan 1871-1951 left a snug life in Pennsylvania for New York City, where he became a chronicler of the urban scene and a founder of the Ashcan school. This biography, as dynamic and colorful as a Sloan canvas, gives us a many-sided man-the youthful art nouveau-style documenter of the leisure class, the hustling Philadelphia newspaper illustrator 1892-1902, the Socialist Party member and editor of the Masses, the truculent eternal outsider who tired of the Ashcan label and moved on to post-Impressionist landscapes, New Mexican paintings and still-never-exhibited erotic art. Sloan met his first wife, Anna ``Dolly'' Wall, in a brothel. Her recurrent breakdowns and sexual encounters with strangers to pay for her alcoholic binges strained their marriage, yet they found common ground in radical causes, mingling with Max Eastman, John Reed, Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge. By charting the disparate styles and personalities of Sloan's Ashcan circle, Loughery, art editor for the Hudson Review, provides a wonderfully astute, intimate portrait of a generation of American realists battling the onslaught of modernism. Photos. June

Donna Seaman

Painter John Sloan 18711951, associated with the Ashcan school, is hardly a household name, but his evocative portrayals of early-twentieth-century New York do resonate in our consciousness and his life story is full of drama. Loughery, author of "Alias S. S. Van Dine" 1992, brings Sloan--an independent, assiduous, talented, and loyal man--to life and, in the process, teaches us as much about love as about art. Sloan got his start as a newspaper artist and became adept at translating his keen insights into the emotional complexity of city life into etchings and paintings as notable for their compassion as for their aesthetics. This open-mindedness was obvious in his private life as well. Eschewing bourgeois values, Sloan fell in love with and married a woman he met in a brothel. The story of their loving if volatile relationship underlies Loughery's engrossing account of their political awakening both Sloans became active Socialists and the steady evolution of Sloan's art. Sloan eventually painted landscapes, portraits, and nudes in addition to his better known urban scenes. We applaud Loughery for bringing Sloan, an often neglected artist, to light.