Determined Drifter

At 76, John Sloan is something of an old master. "But," says Sloan, "if I hadn't been fired from the old Philadelphia Press in 1904, I probably wouldn't have been an artist at all. I'm really just a drifter." As Manhattan gallerygoers could see last week, Sloan's determined drift has taken him far.

On the Press, Sloan, like Fellow Draftsmen Glackens and Shinn, sketched the fires, suicides and parades which news photographers cover today. Of necessity they learned to select story-telling details and to set them down recognizably and fast. Later, under the leadership of Painter Robert Henri, they did much the same thing in oils, and dared to call it art. That threw the academic art world of the day into a righteous rage. Henri's group became the "Ashcan School," hooted at by almost everyone.

Freedom for the Village. To the modern eye, bloodshot from staring at much harsher art, the oils of Sloan's "Ashcan" period look purely poetic. He once clambered to the top of the Washington Square arch to proclaim Greenwich Village an independent republic, and his paintings look like dream-glimpses of such a republic--familiar, but never unpleasantly so. He crowded his painted world with plump ladies and children, always in the best of spirits and often partly undressed. And over them he sometimes succeeded in weaving a deep sparkle of color which few U.S. contemporaries could touch.

But by the time he was 50, Sloan had sold only six serious paintings. To stay alive he did magazine illustrating and taught art. Nowadays he makes a modest living from his painting, but it is his early pictures that sell. Sloan himself looks back on his "Ashcan" oils with an equal mixture of nostalgia and pride. "Young people won't realize," he says mildly, "how sweet . . . sweet and sad Manhattan was before Prohibition. The new skyline looks like a broken comb. We're the dirt between the teeth, unfortunately. And who wants to paint a street all strewn with automobiles?"

Stripes for the Nude. For the past 20 years, Sloan has been laboring to invent a new kind of figure painting. Instead of looking out of the window for subjects, he works mostly from the model, six to eight hours a day, in a big, messy hotel studio just north of Greenwich Village. He paints his models traditionally to start with, in tempera and oil glazes to give them a proper glow. Then, as a finishing touch, he adds hundreds of circling red pinstripes, like scratches, to the flesh tones. For Sloan, the pinstripes "clinch the form"; for almost everyone else, they spoil the picture.

Sloan has outlived the public's disapproval of his "Ashcan" art, and his long, bony, Scotch-Irish face looks almost fiercely stubborn when he says he will prove the public wrong once more. "I shared a studio with Henri once," Sloan says, "and he used to tell me, 'Never feel that you're making a work of art.' Well, I've drifted away from Henri's idea; I guess lately I've been trying to do just that, to paint a work of art."

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