Art: Spectator Painter

John Sloan, who died last summer at 80, was one of America's best painters. This week Manhattan's Whitney Museum opens a retrospective show of his work that brings Sloan vividly back to life.

In his old age he was a bony man who peered warmly at the world through spectacles, talked much, and puffed a pipe for punctuation. "I'm birdlike, yes," he would say, "but so is the American eagle." He painted steadily until death, because that was his chief joy and also because he knew he still had a lot to learn about painting. A born teacher, he never stopped studying: "I am just a student, chewing on a bone."

His formal schooling stopped at 16. Sloan was a poor boy with an itch to make pictures but without much obvious talent ("My sisters and I all drew equally well"). To support himself, Sloan designed calendars and valentines, sold pen & ink copies of Rembrandt etchings. At 21 he went to work for the Philadelphia Inquirer, making on-the-spot news sketches of fires, elections, suicides and parades. The job helped him develop drawing facility, and gave him a down-to-earth philosophy of art: "An artist is a spectator."

Ashcan School. The job also brought him in contact with a small but brilliant group of Philadelphians who shared his attitude. Their leader was Painter Robert Henri; the others were newspaper illustrators: William Glackens, Everett Shinn and George Luks. All of them eventually moved to Manhattan and set up shop.

Critics and public alike gave them the horselaugh. The art fashion of the 1900s was as opposed to realism as it is today. Now, abstractions are the rage; then, art in the U.S. was spelled with a capital A and stood for dreamy, academic idealizations. The lively glimpses of real people, places and things that Sloan and his friends painted struck art lovers as ugly. The group was scornfully dubbed "The Ashcan School."

Within a decade the Ashcan revolution had been swallowed up in a greater one. The famed Armory show of 1913 (which Sloan helped arrange) introduced School-of-Paris art to the U.S., made stay-at-homes like Sloan seem relatively conservative. "The ultra-modern movement," Sloan later recalled, "was wonderful medicine for adults. But since then the kids have raided the medicine cabinet—and for them, it's drugs."

After being damned for Ashcan art, Sloan was praised by conservatives as a painter of the "American scene." That pleased him little more: "As though you didn't see the American scene whenever you opened your eyes! I am not for the American scene, I am for mental realization. If you are American and work, your work will be American."

Professional Fun. Sloan never sold a painting until he was 49. In a book of notes entitled The Gist of Art, Sloan hammers home the point that art is a life, not a living: "The only reason I am in the profession is because it is fun. I have always painted for myself and made my living by illustrating and teaching. Some of the etchings and a few paintings made 20 years ago sell now and then, but ... if what I am doing now were selling I would think there was something the matter with it."