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John Sloan's Santa Fe
July 27 - September 7, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, July 27, 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe
1011 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501
TEL 505.954.5700 FAX 505.954.5754
Hours: Monday-Saturday 10am - 5pm
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For further information contact:
Evan Feldman
Administrative Director of Contemporary Art
(505) 954-5738
efeldman@gpgallery.com
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The Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe is pleased to present an important summer exhibition of Santa Fe subjects and nudes by American art great, John Sloan (1871-1951). A well-known rebel of genteel art and an infamous member of the “Ashcan School” in New York City, Sloan also spent much of his career in the American Southwest. This exhibition, which includes approximately 20 paintings and works on paper, offers rare insight into this somewhat overshadowed aspect of Sloan’s production, despite his nearly 40 summers spent in Santa Fe. John Sloan’s Santa Fe will leadoff with a public opening at the gallery on Friday, July 27, 2007, from 5 to 7 pm.
Born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania in 1871, Sloan attended high school in Philadelphia with William Glackens and Albert C. Barnes. Sloan never attended college or studied art abroad, as was fashionable with fellow fin-de-siecle Americans, perhaps due to his father’s failed business and financial difficulties. This decision not to study abroad may also have been a self-conscious choice reflecting Sloan’s belief in the power of commonplace subjects and local scenes: “The real reason I did not want to go abroad when so many other artists did was that I felt an artist should put down roots in his own country. Too many artists lose their motive for working by searching for romantic subject matter abroad.” Whatever the reason, Sloan dug his heels in and began observing the raw everyday scenes and unsung heroes of urban America, first in Philadelphia and then in New York. He worked as a newspaper illustrator at the Philadelphia Press from 1895 to 1903 and studied under Thomas Anshutz. After his move to New York in 1904, he built his reputation as a sympathetic, often satirical urban-realist painter and etcher who had four prints rejected by the American Watercolor Society in 1906 for being too “vulgar.” In 1913, Sloan helped hang the Armory Show, in which he showed two paintings and five etchings. He began summering at the art colony of Gloucester, Massachusetts, from 1914 to 1918, and began teaching at the Art Students League in 1916.
Under the leadership of Robert Henri, whom he met in Philadelphia, Sloan joined other artist-illustrators in New York to form an insurgent painters’ group known “The Eight” or the “Ashcan School.” The group exhibited independently in 1908 and 1910 at the Exhibition of Independent Artists. Henri’s “revolutionary gang” did much to expand exhibition opportunities for artists at a rigid time in American art when the National Academy controlled popular aesthetic tastes. This liberal approach to exhibition opportunities was a torch that Sloan would carry with him to New Mexico, ultimately influencing the newly founded Museum of New Mexico’s early exhibition practices.
In 1919, Sloan and his wife Dolly, along with Florence and Randall Davey, loaded up a 1912 chain-driven Simplex touring car and motored west. Six weeks later, they arrived in Santa Fe with various stories of “…muddy roads, the difficulty of getting our wives out of comfortable hotels, and the imminence of Prohibition…” and other such incidents which detained them. From 1919-1950, Sloan spent four months of each year painting the indigenous cultures, colorful landscapes, and everyday genre scenes in and around Santa Fe. He bought an adobe house at 314 Garcia Street in Santa Fe in 1920 and soon became involved in the political and social affairs in town.
In 1924, Sloan joined the New Mexico Painters group and shortly thereafter began exploring concepts of representing form through nude studies, a few of which will be showcased in this exhibition. Sloan also began experimenting with different painting techniques and methods, which were likely influenced by his former experience as a draftsman and etcher. An ardent advocate of Native American art, Sloan became an artistic ambassador of sorts, taking works back to New York during the 1920s and 1930s for inclusion in the Independents Show and serving as president of the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts in 1931.
By his eightieth year, Sloan had become so tied to New Mexico that when he summered in New Hampshire to avoid Santa Fe’s high altitude, he described feeling out of place, “like a desert scorpion dropped into a green salad.” Sloan died in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1951, but his contributions as a gritty, urban-realist, summer Santa Fe painter and an advocate for open exhibitions opportunities in New York and New Mexico made him a memorable figure in American Art.
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