John
Sloan,
the son of a travelling salesman, was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania,
on 2nd August, 1871. His family moved to Philadelphia and after he
finished high school he worked for a booksellers.
Sloan studied briefly at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before
finding work as an artist with the Philadelphia
Inquirer (1892-95). This was followed by work at the Philadelphia
Press (1895-1902), where he produced full-page colour pictures
based on news stories.
In 1902 Sloan moved to New York where
he worked as a magazine illustrator. Sloan's paintings were also exhibited
in Chicago, Pittsburgh and New York. In 1904 he met Robert
Henri and became a member of what became known as the Ash Can
School, a group of artists who painted pictures of everyday urban
life. Other members associated with the group included George
Bellows, Rockwell Kent and Edward
Hopper.
In 1910 Sloan joined the Socialist Party
and the following year became art editor of the radical journal, The
Masses. Although they were rarely paid, Sloan persuaded some
of leading artists to provide pictures for the magazine. Artists such
as Robert Henri, Stuart
Davis, George Bellows, Rockwell
Kent, Art Young, Boardman
Robinson, Robert Minor, K.
R. Chamberlain, and Maurice Becker.
Sloan was a strong supporter of woman suffrage and contributed drawing
to the feminist magazines, Woman Voter
and Woman's Journal. Sloan continued
to work for The Masses until 1916,
when he left over a dispute with Max Eastman
about the captions being used with the cartoons.
Sloan became a teacher at the Arts Students
League. After the First World War Sloan
moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he painted local people. He also
contributed illustrations to Collier's
Magazine, Harper's Weekly
and the Saturday Evening Post.
Sloan autobiography, Gist of Art,
was published in 1939. In his book Sloan explained that: "I have
always painted for myself and made my living by illustrating and teaching.
I have never made a living from my painting." In his later years
Sloan became increasingly concerned with studies of the nude in the
1940s. John Sloan died on 7th
September, 1951.
John Sloan,
National Association of
Manufacturers, The Masses (October,
1913)
(1)
John Sloan, Gist of Art (1939)
The night the first copy of The Masses
(under Max Eastman's editorship) came out, I sold seventy-eight copies.
It was at a Suffrage parade. I went up to people, sometimes got on
the running board of a car, saying, "Buy it. It will be worth
ten dollars some day."
(2)
In his autobiography, Homecoming, Floyd
Dell wrote about joining The Masses
in 1914.
I was paid twenty-five dollars a week for helping
Max Eastman get out the magazine. My job on The Masses was
to read manuscripts, bring the best of them to editorial meetings
to be voted on, send back what we couldn't use, read proof, and 'make
up' the magazine - all duties with which I was familiar; and also
to help plan political cartoons and persuade the artists to draw them.
I could submit my stories and poems anonymously to the editorial meetings,
hear them discussed, and print them if they were accepted.
At the monthly editorial meetings, where the literary editors were
usually ranged on one side of all questions and the artists on the
other. The squabbles between literary and art editors were usually
over the question of intelligibility and propaganda versus artistic
freedom; some of the artists held a smouldering grudge against the
literary editors, and believed that Max Eastman and I were infringing
the true freedom of art by putting jokes or titles under their pictures.
John Sloan and Art Young were the only ones of the artists who were
verbally quite articulate; but fat, genial Art Young sided with the
literary editors usually; and John Sloan, a very vigorous and combative
personality, spoke up strongly for the artists.
Nobody gained a penny out of the things published in the magazine;
it was an honour to get into its pages, an honour conferred by vote
at the meetings. Max Eastman and I did get salaries for editorial
work; but that was regarded as dirty work, which ought to be paid
for. We were actually a little republic in which, as artists, we worked
for the approval of our fellows, not for money.
(3)
