John French Sloan - Style and The Ashcan School

Style and The Ashcan School

He was a member of The Eight, a group of realist artists that included Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, George Luks, and William Glackens. The Eight are closely identified with the Ashcan School, although Sloan despised this term. Unlike Henri, Sloan was not a facile painter, and labored over his work—leading Henri to remark that "Sloan" was "the past participle of 'slow'". When Glackens and Sloan were at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Glackens usually got the reportorial assignments because he was more adept than Sloan in making quick sketches. His slow and methodical approach towards sketching carried over to his painting. "Sloan's approach to making urban realist art was based on images seen and remembered (and sometimes written down) rather than sketched in the street, even though his autographic handling of paint and print media conveys the look of a rapid drawing. The effect is conceptual rather than perceptual, which Sloan denigrated as "eyesight" painting." This was a major characteristic of his style, consistent with the Ashcan School's goal of presenting a subject to the viewer with all the immediacy of a snapshot.

Sloan tended to observe city life and dwellers interacting in an intimate setting as they interact. He "concerned himself with what we call genre: street scenes, restaurant life, paintings of saloons, ferry boats, roof tops, back yards, and so on through a whole catalogue of commonplace subjects." Like Edward Hopper, Sloan often used the perspective of the window in his painting, in order to focus closely, but also in order to observe the subject undetected. He wrote in his diary, in 1911 ; "I am in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it ... No insult to the people you are watching to do so unseen." Sloan's attention to isolated incidents within the urban environment recalls the narrative techniques used in the realist fiction and Hollywood films he enjoyed.

Whenever Sloan was asked about the social context of his paintings or about his association with Socialism, he said that they were done with "sympathy, but no social consciousness." "I was never interested in putting propaganda into my paintings, so it annoys me when art historians try to interpret my city life pictures as 'socially conscious.' I saw the everyday life of the people, and on the whole I picked out bits of joy in human life for my subject matter." In the late 1920s, Sloan changed his technique, and abandoned his characteristic urban subject matter in favor of nudes and portraits. Rejecting as superficial the spontaneous, painterly technique of such artists as Manet and Hals—and also of Henri and his followers among The Eight—he turned instead to the underpainting and glazing method used by old masters such as Andrea Mantegna. The resulting paintings, which often made unconventional use of superimposed hatchings to define the forms, have never attained the popularity of his early Ashcan works.