Belated Happy Birthday to American artist John French Sloan, born on August 2, 1871. One of the leading proponents of the anti-academic social realist movement, John French Sloan is considered one of the most important American artists of the early twentieth century. Sloan wanted to document working-class life--the lives of real Americans--so he painted scenes from ordinary life in the rougher immigrant neighborhoods of New York City. Sloan’s subject matter raised eyebrows in artistic circles. Paintings of ordinary life and poor people were unheard of. In fact, Sloan and his fellow artists were criticized for their “inappropriate” and “vulgar” art. They were labeled the Ashcan School, and it wasn’t a compliment. “Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair,” (1912) depicts three women on a tenement rooftop, drying their freshly washed hair in the sunshine. Sunday was bath day--imagine living in a filthy city and only getting a bath once a week. Most women wore their hair long, and they certainly didn’t own hairdryers. But combing out your hair in the sunshine was a chance to talk to your friends, to laugh and relax on a bright sunny day. However, laundry drying in the background reminds the viewer that Sunday was not a day of rest for these women. Sloan also painted cityscapes, many from his studio in a high building in Greenwich Village. “The City from Greenwich Village” (1922), celebrates the vitality and excitement of life in lower Manhattan. The elevated train bisects the nighttime streets of the Village, and Midtown Manhattan seems far, far away, glittering like Oz on the horizon. Sloan later wrote, “The picture makes a record of the beauty of the older city which is giving way to the chopped-out towers of the modern New York.”
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 13:11:56 +0000
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