John Sloan (1871 - 1951)

Précis

John Sloan was born in Lock-Haven, PA. His father was an unsuccessful businessman and his mother a schoolteacher from a well-off Philadelphia merchant family. At a young age, Sloan became adept at drawing and etching and at twenty went to work as a newspaper illustrator for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Signing up for night classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts introduced him to a new set of friends, many of whom would become successful American artists themselves, but most importantly, he met Robert Henri, with whom he kept in close contact until Henri died in 1929. Sloan did not completely adopt Henri's breezy style of painting, but he did agree with Henri's views of taking subject matter from the real world, as opposed to the idealized. Their choice of subject matter led the group to become labelled the "Ash Can School", a term the artists disliked.

Clown Making Up, o/c, 1909, Phillips Collection, D.C.
Image courtesy of Mark Harden's Artchive

After seeing Henri and many of his talented compatriots leave Philadelphia for New York City, Sloan and his wife followed suit, living in various apartments in Chelsea and the West Village. Sloan worked most of his life as a newspaper and magazine illustrator, and after acting as a substitute teacher for Henri, also began to teach art classes at various schools over the years, most extensively at the Art Students League. An intelligent, cynical and independent man, Sloan was heavily involved in the Socialist movement during the 1910's, although he eventually became jaded with the failures in Russia, and the growing ties between the movement and that country. Although Sloan played an important role in some of America's most important art movements at the turn of the century (the "Eight" and the Exhibition of Independent Artists who protested the conservatism of the National Academy), he never was able to make a living selling his paintings. He is best known for the New York urban scenes painted during his first ten years in the city, but he also became extremely interested in the nude and in landscapes, many of which he painted in his summers in Santa Fe, NM and Gloucester, MA. Later in life he shifted from direct painting to using color glazes and cross-hatched strokes.

Excerpts from John Sloan's Writings (source))

[editor's note: unfortunately, most of the letters between Sloan and Henri focused on the happenings of their lives and the shows they managed to pull off, but touch very little on their artistic views. Thankfully, Helen Farr Sloan, Sloan's second wife and former student, forced him to put down much of his thoughts and teachings in the 1939 book, Gist of Art. If I could quote the entire book, I would. It is difficult to get ahold of, but if you can find the book, you will find it fascinating. Unless otherwise noted, the below excerpts come from Gist of Art.]

"Though a living cannot be made at art, art makes life worth living. It makes living, living. It makes starving, living. It makes worry, it makes trouble, it makes a life that would be barren of everything -- living. It brings life to life."

"We came to the realistic conclusion that an artist who wanted to be independent must expect to make a living separate from the pictures painted for his own pleasure. We could attack the art academies and public taste with freedom honestly earned." *Loughery

"What more do you want to know about an artist when you have his work?"

[editor's note: he writes this, yet Sloan very clearly read a great deal about other artists]

"Many intelligent people have accepted the false idea that accuracy in representing visual facts is a sign of progress in art. Such imitation of superficial effects has nothing to do with art, which is and always has been the making of mental concepts. Even the scientist is interested in effects only as a phenomena from which to deduce order in life." ... "'Looks like' is not the test of a good painting. It indicates merely visual similarity and shows that the artist has not put his brain to work."

"Every art student should paint the simple solids: that is, spheres, cubes, cylinders, pyramids, and cones. ... Thomas Eakins always insisted on his students painting simple studies of such things as an egg, a lump of sugar, or a piece of chalk to try to get the texture."

"Sometimes it is best to say something new with an old technique, because ninety-nine people out of a hundred see only technique. Glackens had the courage to use Renoir's version of the Rubens-Titian technique and he found something new to say with it.
   Cezanne may have tried to paint like El Greco, but he couldn't help making Cezannes. He never had to worry about whether he was being original.
   Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody. Witness Shakespeare and Rembrandt. They borrowed from the technique of tradition and created new images by the power of their imagination and human understanding. Little men just borrow from one person. Assimilate all you can from tradition and then say things in your own way.
   There are as many ways of drawing as there are ways of thinking and thoughts to think."

"I don't believe in art for art's sake. I think that very often a literary motive may inspire the finest art, in fact almost always."

"Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time -- condemned to painting for life."

"Good art cannot be defined because such a definition would have to include the word beauty. People have written volumes to define the word beauty, and I can't believe that the books would have been so long if they had found the definition. My own definition of art does not specify good art: Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life."