Art: Unbuttoned Painter

John Sloan never exhibited a painting until he was 29, never sold one until he was 49. At 68, grey-haired but still impetuous, Artist Sloan now & then manages to sell “some of the etchings and a few paintings made 20 years ago.”*Though his fame is surpassed by few U. S. painters, he has had to support himself by teaching and illustrating. Last week he told of his career in an autobiographical critique of painting.* Gist of his Gist of Art: “That I am alive, it hurts me to confess, does not prove that one can make a living at art.”

In the ’90s, John Sloan was a staff artist on the old Philadelphia Press. Newsphotos had not yet been developed, and artists covered fires, parades, elections like reporters rushed back to do their drawings from notes or memory. In 1905 Sloan moved to Manhattan, settled in Greenwich Village as a book and magazine illustrator, etched and painted between commissions. His background gave Artist Sloan a taste for catching people in their unbuttoned moments, taught him it was no shame to tell stories in his pictures.

So absorbed in the U. S. scene is Artist Sloan that he has never left its boundaries. He and his miniature wife Dolly (“the little woman who has been my right hand man”) spend their winters in Manhattan, their summers in New Mexico. Liked by everyone are Artist Sloan’s portrayals of city life with its socks down: lean cats scavenging in a snowy back yard, a dust storm on Fifth Avenue, scrubwomen in a library, girls on a roof drying their hair, men lined up at a bar. Less liked are the strange, bright-colored nudes, hatched and crosshatched in red, green, black, with which he has stubbornly experimented for the past ten years.

John Sloan’s place in contemporary art is so thoroughly accepted that he is in danger of being taken for granted. Gallery-goers find it hard to realize that his atmospheric, human scenes of pre-War-I Manhattan were damned as paintings of “The Ashcan School” when his group of realists held their first show in 1908. Last week he summed himself up: “I never thought of one of my good pictures as art while painting it. Whether it was art or not, it was what I wanted to do. . . . I am grateful to have lived this long and look forward to more years of hard work. I am just a student, chewing on a bone. . . .”

*Announced last week by the Wichita (Kans.) Museum of Art was the purchase of John Sloan’s Hudson Sky, painted in 1908, one of eight canvases by leading U. S. artists that will serve as nucleus for the museum’s projected gallery of U. S. painting. *GIST OF ART — American Artists Group ($3-75).