Reynolda House Museum closing " Seeing the City : John Sloan's New York "

Written by Tim Degree Monday, 07 February 2011 23:00

 

WINSTON SALEM, NC.- The Reynolda House Museum of American Art presents Seeing the City: Sloan’s New York, a traveling exhibition focusing on John Sloan’s images of New York City in paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs to present an in-depth view of the artist’s years in the city and the city’s effect on his art. Far from glamorizing the emerging vertical vistas of sky-scrapers, Sloan focused instead on people, public spaces, street life, elevated trains, and the pedestrian experience. Seeing the City will be on display at the Reynolda House through January 4, 2009. 

The Delaware Art Museum organized this exhibition, drawing on the abundance of material in its own art and archival collections supplemented by loans from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, The Phillips Collection, and various other public and private collections.

By bringing together numerous images in all media from 1904 through the 1930s, Seeing the City is the first major traveling exhibition to focus on Sloan’s depictions of New York and the first since the 1970s to present significant new scholarship on the artist. This exhibition is also the first to isolate Sloan’s vision from that of his “Ashcan School” colleagues in order to explore his individual contribution. As Sloan moved through the vast and rapidly changing metropolis, he made sense of it by describing—in his diaries, letters, and pictures—the streets, squares, gathering places, and city dwellers he encountered. He created a “pedestrian aesthetic,” helping to define New York City in the popular imagination and creating what one critic called the “slang” of the city.

John Sloan
From 1892 until 1904, John Sloan (1871-1951) worked as an artist at Philadelphia newspapers and contributed illustrations to magazines. In 1904, Sloan moved to New York City, determined to pursue a career as a painter. After the 1908 exhibition of The Eight, some of the group’s artists were derogatorily called the Ashcan School for their depiction of the less savory areas of the city. Sloan’s paintings of New York centered on his favorite subject: the “drab, shabby, happy, sad, and human life” of a city and its people. While Sloan remains best known for the New York scenes he painted during his first 10 years there, he was also an able landscapist and portraitist, as well as a prolific printmaker.

Helen Farr Sloan (1911-2005) first met John Sloan when she enrolled in the New York Art Students League. Over the course of more than four decades, Mrs. Sloan donated thousands of paintings, prints, and drawings as well as manuscript materials to the Delaware Art Museum. This is the largest gift made to the Museum since the founding gifts of the Howard Pyle collection and the Pre-Raphaelite collection.

Visit the Reynolda House Museum of American Art  at: http://www.reynoldahouse.org/index.php

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