John Sloan (American, 1871-1951), Blue Kimono, 1913, oil on canvas, 26 x 32-1/2 inches (66 x 82.6 cm). Museum purchase, 1964. © Frye Art Museum

John Sloan's Blue Kimono
Richard V. West

By 1913, when the American artist John Sloan (1871-1951) painted Blue Kimono, he was a well-known member of a circle of artists who had asserted their independence from the then-dominant National Academy. Dissatisfied with their treatment by the Academy, eight artists, including Sloan, George B. Luks (1867-1933), William J. Glackens (1870-1938), Everett Shinn (1873-1953), Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928), Maurice B. Prendergast (1861-1924), and Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), under the leadership of the charismatic painter and teacher Robert Henri (1865-1929), marked their protest with an exhibition held in February 1908 at the Macbeth Gallery in New York. The exhibition was a media sensation, if not a financial success for the artists, and marked the emergence of a powerful independent movement in American art. The momentum created by the exhibition of "The Eight" led to an even larger exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910 and culminated in the famous Armory Show of 1913, which introduced contemporary European developments to the American public.

John Sloan was the most socially and politically engaged artist of the Eight. An avowed Socialist in the early years of the century, he contributed illustrations to such journals as The Masses, becoming its art editor in 1912. It was probably due to his paintings, which at that time favored a dark palette and scenes of the gritty side of urban life in turn-of-the-century New York City, that the entire group was later dubbed the "Ashcan School" by art critics. (In point of fact, only one painting by Sloan, Carmine Theater of 1912, ever showed an ash can.) Sloan described himself as a voyeur, a spectator of the human dramas he glimpsed in the streets and tenements. This was noted by a critic just a year after the first exhibition of The Eight:

John Sloan was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania in 1871. His father, a cabinetmaker, moved the family to Philadelphia in 1876, where the young boy grew up and went to school. A classmate of William Glackens and Albert C. Barnes (the famed collector and advocate of modern art), Sloan left school at the age of sixteen to help support his family. An avid reader and budding artist, he soon taught himself drawing and etching, eventually landing a job as an illustrator for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1892. Sloan attended evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he became friends with Robert Henri, recently returned from several years study in Paris. Henri soon became the center for a group of young Philadelphia artists --- most of them newspaper illustrators --- which included Sloan, Shinn, Glackens, and Luks.

Henri was adamant in his opposition to the prevailing academic currents in both America and Europe, and infused his colleagues with enthusiasm for the achievements of past masters such as Frans Hals and Velasquez. More importantly, he made the circle of young artists intensely aware of the work of two near contemporaries: the French artist Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and the American painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). Henri, drawing on his own experience in the classes he attended in Paris, inveighed against the limitations placed on artistic development by the French Academy. Most famous is Henri's remark comparing Manet with the then reigning master of French academic painting, William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905): "Judging a Manet from the point of view of Bouguereau, the Manet has not been finished. Judging a Bouguereau from the viewpoint of Manet, the Bouguereau has not been begun."

When Henri moved to New York, the others eventually followed. Sloan arrived in New York in 1904, and began a long struggle to get enough commissions as an illustrator to survive. Although his City Life etchings and his paintings brought him critical recognition, they remained largely unsold (Sloan's first painting was sold in 1913 to his former classmate, Albert C. Barnes). This did not stop the artist, who created a large number of works cherished today because they capture the spirit and energy of New York in the throes of growth and change. After the 1908 exhibition, Sloan began to receive more commissions for illustration work and in May 1912 he felt financially secure enough to move from his tiny cramped studio on West 23rd Street to a much larger loft studio on Sixth Avenue. This enabled him to take on students and, more importantly, seriously to begin drawing and painting the human figure from live models.

One of the results of the opportunity provided by the bigger studio is the Frye's painting, Blue Kimono. The painting is possibly part of a series of paintings exploring varying aspects of the figure. For example, a slightly earlier work, Prone Nude of 1912, is a canvas of the same size, virtually identical in pose and setting to the Blue Kimono. There is also a faint echo of one of Sloan's and Henri's great heroes: the model, reclining and staring straight at the viewer, clearly evokes the provocative reclining figure in Manet's Olympia of 1863.

In the Blue Kimono, however, Sloan was not only exploring issues of pose and composition. Four years before, Robert Henri had introduced Sloan to Hardesty Gillmore Maratta (1864-1924), a painter and color theorist who had created pre-determined palettes of colors related by "intervals" akin to the tones of a musical scale. Henri had become an enthusiastic supporter of Maratta's color palettes and persuaded many of his students and colleagues, including Sloan, to work with them. Soon, the dark brown tones that had characterized much of Sloan's earlier work began to be replaced by lavender, blue, or silvery grey Maratta color schemes. Sloan continued his experiments with Maratta's colors until the late 1920s.

In the Frye painting, Sloan uses the rich blues and reds of the robe to set off the flesh tones of the model. These loosely and freely painted colors are, in turn, contrasted against the shimmering whites of the draped sheet below the figure and the indeterminate dark bluish gray strokes of the background. The whole color scheme is anchored by a warm brown strip of floor just visible along the bottom edge of the painting. The painting appears to be, in fact, a carefully thought out color study based on a limited palette.

Sloan continued to develop as an artist, painting actively up to his death in 1951. From the 1930s on his work was characterized by a greater emphasis on structure and form, inspired by his growing familiarity with European modern art. Like many of his contemporaries, Sloan attempted to develop a theoretical base for his work. Dissatisfied with simply painting until forms emerged on the canvas, the artist developed a methodology that overlaid a linear structure derived from his graphic work over painted forms. Many critics, however, lamented the loss of the freshness and spontaneity of his earlier style, of which Blue Kimono is such an outstanding example. Ultimately, John Sloan's reputation and regard have come to be based primarily on the prints, drawings, illustrations, and paintings he created during a decade of feverish activity between his arrival in New York in 1904 and the Armory Show of 1913.

The Frye Art Museum is fortunate to possess representative and important examples of works by all the artists who comprised The Eight. These include paintings by Henri (El Picador, 1908), Lawson (End of Day), Luks (Danty), Davies (Hills of the Sierras, 1910), and Glackens (Beatrice Dressing, after 1910); pastels by Shinn (The Rehearsal and Central Park); and a watercolor by Prendergast (Beach Scene, Marblehead).

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