John Sloan



John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 – September 7, 1951) was an influential U.S. painter and teacher, and a leading member of a group of American artists known as The Eight. He is commonly associated with the Ashcan School of realist artists.

Quotes of John Sloan

 * I have nothing to teach you that will help you to make a living. [as art teacher, advising his students]
 * In: Loughery, John. John Sloan: Painter and Rebel. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. ISBN 0-8050-5221-6, pp. 224-225


 * [on Diego Rivera:] ..the one artist on this continent who is in the class of the old masters.
 * In: Brooks, Van Wyck. John Sloan: a Painter's Life. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1955, p. 170

The Gist of Art (1939)

 * People who take things too literally don't get much of anything from my teaching. By never saying anything I mean, I say a great deal. I never mean anything I say under oath. I never mean exactly what I say. Not even this. You have to read between the words.
 * In John Sloan on Drawing and Painting. Mineola NY: Dover Publications, 2000. Originally published in 1939 as The Gist of Art, p. 7.


 * [As a painting teacher] I'm not flirting, playing around. I'm serious about it.. .If you don't want to be serious about playing [at art], do something of no account. Go into banking. Buy collar buttons at five cents a dozen and sell them for five cents a piece.
 * Ibid. p. 8.


 * It takes a great deal of strong personality to survive the art school training. Hard nuts that the art schools can't crack and devour get through and become artists.
 * Ibid., p. 8.


 * The idea of taking up art as a calling, a profession, is a mirage. Art enriches life. It makes life worth living. But to make a living at it—that idea is incompatible with making art.
 * Ibid., p. 26.


 * Then there is this idea that the world owes you a living. Here is a little thought about that. It isn't particularly logical but it makes my point. You were paid when you were born, with the privilege of living. Death is all that is coming to you. Life came to you when you were born.
 * Ibid., p. 27.


 * [choosing his scenes by:] ..night vigils at the back window.
 * The Gist of Art Joan Sloan, New York: Artist Group, 1939, p. 220

Quotes about John Sloan

 * The Masses marked, I have been told, the first appearance of "realism" in an American magazine. But I was ignorant of, and indifferent to, schools of art and literature. Of the new movement in art represented by John Sloan, George Bellows, and the other pupils of Robert Henri, I had never heard.
 * Max Eastman "The Policy of The Masses: An Editor's Reflections"


 * John Sloan not having been abroad [in contrary to Hopper himself], has seen these things [Sloan's interpretations in his etchings of New York during the 1910's] with a truer and fresher eye than most.. .The hard early training has given to Sloan a facility and a power of invention that the pure painter seldom achieves.
 * Edward Hopper in: 'Joan Sloan' Hopper, p. 172; as quoted in "Edward Hopper", Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 39


 * For a brief time, roughly between 1912 and 1918, The Masses became the rallying center-as sometimes also a combination of circus, nursery, and boxing ring-for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture. In its pages you could find brilliant artists and cartoonists, like John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Art Young; one of the best journalists in our history, John Reed (journalist), a writer full of an indignation against American injustice that was itself utterly American; a shrewd and caustic propagandist like Max Eastman; some gifted writers of fiction, like Sherwood Anderson; and one of the few serious theoretical minds American socialism has produced, William English Walling. All joined in a rumpus of revolt, tearing to shreds the genteel tradition that had been dominant in American culture, poking fun at moral prudishness and literary timidity, mocking the deceits of bourgeois individualism, and preaching a peculiarly uncomplicated version of the class struggle. There has never been, and probably never will again be, another radical magazine in the U. S. quite like The Masses, with its slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope.
 * Irving Howe Introduction to Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911-1917 by William L. O'Neill (1989)


 * In attempting to break new ground in his painting during the 1920's, Hopper found inspiration in Joan Sloan's interpretations of New York.. .He particularly admired the paintings and prints [etchings] produced just after Sloan's arrival in New York from Philadelphia in 1904..  .Among his contemporaries, Hopper seems to have identified most closely with Sloan, who like himself had worked as an illustrator at the beginning of his career.. .More than anything else, Sloan's choice of subject matter made an impression on Hopper during his formative years. Many subjects, and even titles like 'Night Windows' and 'Barber Shop' appeared first in Sloan's work and subsequently in Hopper's. Common themes include a woman in an interior by a window, city rooftops, urban street scenes, and city parks, restaurants and movie theaters.
 * Gail Levin, in her art-book "Edward Hopper", Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, pp. 39-40