The Delaware Art Museum presents “John Sloan in Philadelphia and New York,” a focused exhibition celebrating the return of several of Sloan’s works to the museum following a tour that ended in 2008. The exhibition will be on view until September 20.
Approximately two dozen paintings and etchings are featured in this show, including some pieces that were part of the traveling exhibition “Seeing the City: Sloan’s New York,” which was organized by the Delaware Art Museum.
John Sloan (1871‱951) made Philadelphia the subject of many of his pieces before moving to New York in 1904. “John Sloan in Philadelphia and New York” examines works created between 1892 and 1928, allowing visitors to see the evolution of Sloan’s vision of city life.
Raised in Philadelphia, Sloan began working as a newspaper illustrator for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1890s. He took classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and befriended fellow illustrators William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn.
Under the influence of Robert Henri, these young illustrators began to paint what they knew best, the city and people around them. For Sloan this meant a narrow band of Center City. Sloan found most of his subjects within a few blocks of his studio on Walnut Street.
When he moved to New York, Sloan continued to take subjects from the streets and parks of his neighborhoods in Chelsea and Greenwich Village. In February 1908 Sloan vaulted into the limelight with his paintings of “the everyday New York, the ever changing New York, the neighborhood New York.”
One of eight American painters showing his work in a controversial exhibition at Macbeth Galleries, Sloan received both praise and scathing criticism for his pictures of everyday life in the streets, parks and apartment buildings of lower Manhattan.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Michael Lobel, associate professor of art history, State University of New York, Purchase College, will present a lecture, “John Sloan: Becoming an Artist.” He will analyze some of Sloan’s best-known imagery and consider it in the context of Sloan’s lesser-known commercial illustrations, offering a revised view of Sloan’s career as an artist. The free lecture will be at the museum, Saturday, April 25, at 1 pm.
The Delaware Art Museum is at 2301 Kentmere Parkway. For more information, 302-571-9590 or 866-232-3714 (toll free) or www.delart.org .
