Gotham, High and Low

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The New York Sun

The Ashcan painters are better than you may remember, and the fact that New York now has two shows devoted to their work suggests they’ve inspired renewed interest. One of these exhibitions, “Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artist’s Brush with Leisure, 1895–1925,” opens today at the New-York Historical Society.

But another, smaller show, “John Sloan’s New York,” opened last week at the Museum of the City of New York. This exhibition contains 34 prints, primarily, and drawings that Sloan (1871–1951) executed between 1904 and 1930.

Like most of the Ashcan painters, Sloan was based in and was identified with New York, but he was not from New York. He grew up in Philadelphia and he came as a young man to New York for the same reasons that drew so many others in his profession. At the turn of the last century, New York was already established as the American capital of the publishing business, especially as regarded those weekly and monthly magazines that needed endless quantities of the sort of illustrations men such as Sloan were uniquely qualified to produce.

And in fact the 34 images that we see at the Museum of the City of New York, despite their fidgety, energetic lines, stand somewhere between drawing and illustration, if by the latter is meant a legibility and an anecdotal forthrightness that are alien to the indirection that fine art usually favors.

In these depictions of New York life at the turn of the century, Sloan ranges far and wide among the neighborhoods of the city and among the classes that inhabit them. We meet the working-class women of the Lower East Side no less than the elegant, fur-covered matrons from farther uptown. Also depicted are street people in Washington Square Park as well as a number of scenes of the then nascent New York art scene, clearly inspired by Daumier, with snooty critics and self-important connoisseurs stuffing their noses into the works on view.

In the process, Sloan presents us with some of the recognizable types who still dwell among us in New York, but who, it turns out, are more inveterate to our city than we may have guessed. The young mothers who inhabit Sloan’s Washington Square Park are not representative of maternity universally, but of maternity in its specific Gothamite application: Seemingly independent and progressively dressed, they chat among themselves in the urban parks while their children get into sundry trouble.

Since Sloan spent many years in the vicinity of Greenwich Village and Chelsea, he was not only one of the colorful Bohemians who came to define that part of the city: He was also there to record its evolution into the artistic center that it more recognizably became after World War II, but that, in these prints, it is already beginning to resemble.

Perhaps the most valuable thing about this exhibition is that it effectively distills for us — better than any photograph could — the unique urban quality of New York in the early years of the last century. As in the novels of Theodore Dreiser, we feel how it must have been to stroll on the sidewalks of the metropolis on a summer’s evening or to run for cover from a winter storm. There is a charming scene of still extant McSorely’s Tavern in the East Village, which, even in 1916, was old enough to count as something of a tourist attraction. Other scenes include boys sledding in Central Park and, in one of the latest images, from 1926, a flapper showing off her stockinged legs in the subway.

As tumultuously and variously charming as these 34 images are, however, they can hardly claim to represent Sloan’s most enduring achievement, which was squarely set forth in his paintings. Surely there is a continuity between his prints and paintings, but in the latter we see how fine a colorist he was when he applied himself, and how much liquid life he, together with his more talented compeers in the Ashcan School, could conjure out of squirted impastos of pigment. It is because of those paintings that John Sloan makes, and will continue to make, a claim on the attention of the art-loving public.

Until February 24 (1220 Fifth Ave. at 103rd Street, 212-534-1673).


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