Big New John Sloan Show at Delaware Art Museum

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Delaware Art Museum (DAM) in Wilmington, DE is organizing the first large scale exhibition in some years of the paintings of the famous Ashcan School artist John Sloan (Am. 1871-1951). The DAM has the larges collection of the artist's work and a significant Sloan archive. 

Here's a large detail of one of the paintings the exhibition's Curator, Heather Campbell Coyle, is planning to include in the  show- Blonde Nude with Orange, Blue Couch painted around 1917. I think it's one of Sloan's best examples of what he could do with color. He knew how to use it to enliven one of the most difficult subjects to paint- skin. Look at the shadows in the detail below.




Determined to avoid monotony of color, Sloan carefully painted the shadows on the buttock and on the bottom knee with relatively cooler colors. Contrasting them, the woman's upper knee slides toward a warmer orange as our eye moves into that shadow. It works beautifully.

Here's another detail-


I'm grateful that wasn't my arm that Sloan asked to hold up the fruit- I can feel his poor model's deltoid starting to scream. Nonetheless, the silhouette of her extended arm creates such an arresting shape. Sloan wants to be sure our eye sees this so he paints the immediately surrounding blue cloth a more contrasting darker and brighter blue. Also notice how her biceps and triceps are a cooler hue that gradually becomes warmer as we travel from her shoulder to her wrist. It's his way of making the whole journey interesting.

 I first got interested in Sloan in 1969 when I studied figure painting  at the Art Students League of New York. It was a good class and I learned a lot. But my fondest memory was discovering a small framed photograph hanging on the classroom wall. Peering out through the dusty picture glass was John Sloan sometime in the '30's or '40's posing with his own painting class that he had taught in the very same room. I remember thinking, "God this is great, I must be in the right place!"

An American Journey: The Art of John Sloan runs from Oct. 21, 2017 to Jan. 28, 2018.

P.S. Delaware Art Museum has asked me to give a gallery talk during the show: Artists on Art: John Sloan from an Artist's Perspective on Sunday, Dec. 3,  at 2:30 p.m. I will pick a few paintings from the exhibition and talk about the color and compositional moves Sloan chose to make them visually come to life. All welcome.

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