| John Sloan (1871-1951) | ||
| Butler |  Portrait from Metropolitan
Lives at NMAA.John Sloan was the complete opposite of Luks. He carefully weighed every action, so he was the last of the artist-reporters to leave Philadelphia for New York. In New York he spent hours looking out the window of his West 23rd Street studio, sketching his neighbors. "Young people don't realize how sweet - sweet and sad - New York was before Prohibition. But now, who'd want to paint a street strewn with automobiles? The skyline? It's like a comb in the restroom of a filling station. A tooth here and there missing, and all filled with dirt. Unfortunately, we're the dirt." He ran for the state assembly in 1908 as a Socialist but lost. His paintings might be of a group of women drying their hair on a rooftop or a cat walking across a roof. Theodore Roosevelt praised one of his paintings in 1913, but neither Roosevelt nor anyone else bought it. When a friend asked why he continued to paint when sales were so few, he replied, "The only reason I am in the profession is because it is fun." "We always regarded contemporary success as artistic failure."
|
It took a
long time for Sloan to make a decision: Slow Sloan.