Word: sloan
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...John Sloan, who died last summer at 80, was one of America's best painters. This week Manhattan's Whitney Museum opens a retrospective show of his work that brings Sloan vividly back to life...
...formal schooling stopped at 16. Sloan was a poor boy with an itch to make pictures but without much obvious talent ("My sisters and I all drew equally well"). To support himself, Sloan designed calendars and valentines, sold pen & ink copies of Rembrandt etchings. At 21 he went to work for the Philadelphia Inquirer, making on-the-spot news sketches of fires, elections, suicides and parades. The job helped him develop drawing facility, and gave him a down-to-earth philosophy of art: "An artist is a spectator...
...horselaugh. The art fashion of the 1900s was as opposed to realism as it is today. Now, abstractions are the rage; then, art in the U.S. was spelled with a capital A and stood for dreamy, academic idealizations. The lively glimpses of real people, places and things that Sloan and his friends painted struck art lovers as ugly. The group was scornfully dubbed "The Ashcan School...
Within a decade the Ashcan revolution had been swallowed up in a greater one. The famed Armory show of 1913 (which Sloan helped arrange) introduced School-of-Paris art to the U.S., made stay-at-homes like Sloan seem relatively conservative. "The ultra-modern movement," Sloan later recalled, "was wonderful medicine for adults. But since then the kids have raided the medicine cabinet-and for them, it's drugs...
After being damned for Ashcan art, Sloan was praised by conservatives as a painter of the "American scene." That pleased him little more: "As though you didn't see the American scene whenever you opened your eyes! I am not for the American scene, I am for mental realization. If you are American and work, your work will be American...