A Reporter of Innocence

Much as the cloistered university literary critic is expected to review the not-so-recent past, so the art museum, among its many obligations, is expected to review in tranquillity the previous generation and, by assembling the art ist's life work, allow a fair evaluation of his achievements.

Such a retrospective has now been given William Glackens at St. Louis' City Art Museum,* the painter's first since a memorial show assembled shortly after his death in 1938. At that time Glackens seemed out of fashion, with his tranquil ladies, summer-resort scenes and cityscapes thronged with meandering crowds. Today, his obvious borrowing from Renoir's palette seems less important than the pleasures of his sinuous brush stroke, sauciness of color, and the pure joyousness of his subjects. Although Glackens borrowed the impressionists' glasses, he saw the American scene with eyes that were first trained in the reporter's craft.

Joy from the Ashcan. Glackens believed first and foremost in illustrating the everyday life around him. Born in Philadelphia in 1870, he studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy, became a newspaper artist, along with George Luks, John Sloan and Everett Shinn, for the Philadelphia Press and later the New York World. Afterhours, the group congregated around Painter Robert Henri, trying to match the dark brown tints of old masters like Frans Hals and recent ones like Manet.

This group became known as "the Eight," and made its impact on the U.S. scene with such glum paintings of the cluttered urban scene that they were dubbed "the Ashcan School." But, traveling abroad in 1912 as the agent for Philadelphia Millionaire Dr. Albert C. Barnes, inventor of the bland antiseptic Argyrol, Glackens became more impressed by the vigor of contemporary French painting, helped Barnes acquire at bargain prices high-toned paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse and Renoir.

The Girl on Main Street. Glackens was the gentlest of these American impressionists. "Psychologically," Barnes said later, "Glackens is more akin to Renoir than any painter of our age." The painter's world was not the cafes of Paris but the more innocent one of the soda fountains of the U.S. He avoided the hurdy-gurdy of boxing matches, bathing beaches and laundry slung from slum fire stairs. Yet it is Glackens' reportorial honesty that lends to his lush vision of realism of America on the eve of world involvement.

While Renoir painted great peasant nudes who loom like earth goddesses, Glackens painted the girl-next-door on Main Street or in Greenwich Village. And if Glackens' peachy women have downcast eyes, it is not from sadness but wistfulness for a world that would never be the same. They seem ready to hope more than to rejoice, like closeted daughters waiting to make a debut and sport their beauty--which both they, and American art, were about to do, in fewer years than even the most optimistic imagined.

* The exhibition will be seen next at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art.

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