This fascinating book highlights the artist’s early career as an illustrator and how it influenced his work as a painter and shaped his response to modernism.
Descriptions and histories of the 1,265 oils by John Sloan (1871-1951), more than 1,000 of which are illustrated. Includes critical commentary, the artist's own comments, and an analysis of Sloan's work and his role in American painting. Indexing by title and subject. Illustrated.
This book examines the portrayal of themes of boundary crossing, itinerancy, relocation, and displacement in US genre paintings during the second half of the long nineteenth century (c. 1860–1910). Through four diachronic case studies, the book reveals how the high-stakes politics of mobility and identity during this period informed the production and reception of works of art by Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831–1915), Thomas Hovenden (1840–95), and John Sloan (1871–1951). It also complicates art history’s canonical understandings of genre painting as a category that seeks to reinforce social hierarchies and emphasize more rooted connections to place by, instead, privileging portrayals of social flux and geographic instability. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, American studies, and cultural geography.
John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 - September 7, 1951) was a U.S. artist. As a member of The Eight, a group of American artists, he became a leading figure in the Ashcan School of realist artists. He was known for his urban genre painting and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often through his window. Sloan has been called "the premier artist of the Ashcan School who painted the inexhaustible energy and life of New York City during the first decades of the twentieth century," and an "early twentieth-century realist painter who embraced the principles of socialism and placed his artistic talents at the service of those beliefs.
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.
This exhibition sets the art of Edward Hopper in the context of the diverse and controversial movements dominating American art during the first half of the twentieth century.