1. Sloan, John, “Early Days,” in Sloan, Helen Farr, ed., American Art Nouveau: The Poster Period of John Sloan (Lock Haven, Pa.: privately published, 1967)Google Scholar, unpaged. Sloan made the remarks in about 1946 or 1947 according to Mrs. Sloan in conversation with the author, March 12, 1979. Kwiat, Joseph J., however, argues that Sloan was socially conscious in his paintings, in “John Sloan: An American Artist as Social Critic, 1900–1917,” Arizona Quarterly, 10 (Spring 1954), 52–64.Google Scholar

2. For histories of the group, see Bullard, John Edgar III, “John Sloan and the Philadelphia Realists and Illustrators, 1890–1920,” master's thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1968Google Scholar; Homer, William Innes, Robert Henri and His Circle, with the assistance of Violet Organ (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar; and Perlman, Bennard B., The Immortal Eight: American Painting from Eakins to the Armory Show, 1870–1913 (New York: Exposition Press, 1962)Google Scholar. Perlman's book is being published in a new edition by D. Van Nostrand.

3. Mott, Frank Luther, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1957), IV, 207.Google Scholar

4. Stickley, Gustav, “Social Unrest: A Condition Brought About by Separating the People into Two Factions, Capital and Labor,” The Craftsman, 13 (11 1907), 183Google Scholar.

5. Traubel, Horace, “Review of Upton Sinclair's ‘The Industrial Republic,’” The Conservator, May 1909, p. 43.Google Scholar

6. Caffin, Charles H., The Story of American Painting (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1907), p. 367.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., pp. 370, 373.

8. Ibid., p. 367.

9. Henri, Robert, “The New York Exhibition of Independent Artists,” The Craftsman, 18 (05 1910), 162Google Scholar. Henri also praised Rockwell Kent.

10. For facts and dates I have relied primarily on Sloan, John, John Sloan's New York Scene: From the Diaries, Notes and Correspondence, 1906–1913. ed. John, Bruce St., intro. by Sloan, Helen Farr (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)Google Scholar, referred to in the text as the Diary. Quotations given with the permission of Helen Farr Sloan. For Sloan's later remarks and comments by Mrs. Sloan published in that volume, the reference will be to New York Scene. For dates regarding Sloan's involvement in Socialist Party politics, see Weeks, Barbara Anne, “The Artist: John Sloan's Encounter with American Socialism,” master's thesis, Univ. of West Florida, 1973.Google Scholar

11. Articles and master's theses that have addressed the issue of the nonpolitical nature of Sloan's paintings, as well as other artists of the Eight are: Brown, Milton W., “The Ash Can School,” American Quarterly, 1 (Summer 1949), 127–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Milton W., “The Two John Sloans,” Art News, 50 (01 1952), 24–27Google Scholar; Colman, David Elliot, “The Social Commentary of John Sloan, 1900–1916, in the Context of American Progressivism,” master's thesis, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1972Google Scholar; Fitzgerald, Richard, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Goldin, Amy, “The Eight's Laissez-Faire Revolution,” Art in America, 61 (07–08 1973), 42–49Google Scholar; Liasson, Mara, “The Eight and 291: Radical Art in the First Two Decades of the 20th Century,” American Art Review, 2 (07–08 1975), 91–106Google Scholar; as well as Weeks “The Artist.”

12. Shapiro, David and Shapiro, Cecile, “Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting,” in Salzman, Jack, ed., Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, 3 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 209Google Scholar. See also Shapiro, David, ed., Social Realism: Art as a Weapon (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973).Google Scholar

13. Helen Farr Sloan in her introduction to New York Scene, p. xxGoogle Scholar, stated: “When Sloan was actively interested in socialism, back in 1909 until the First World War broke out in 1914, he was often pressed by doctrinaire-minded party members to put political propaganda into his work.” The original meaning of “avant-garde” as applied to art meant those artists who were expressiing the aims of the political avant-garde. Rosenberg, Harold, in “The Avant-Garde: Collective, Ideological, Combative,” in Hess, Thomas B. and Ashbery, John, eds. The Avant-Garde: Art News Annual (New York: Macmillan, 1968) XXXIV, 78Google Scholar, noted, “The term ‘avant-garde’ was coined by social philosophers after the construction of a new order had been thrown open to competition by the French Revolution. An elite of artists, Saint-Simon thought, would march in the van of representatives of all the intellectual faculties capable of contributing to the social good.” See also Shapiro, and Shapiro, , “Abstract Expressionism,” 210–11Google Scholar. Longer discussions can be found in Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Egbert, Donald, “The Idea of the Avant-Garde in Art and Politics,” The American Historical Review, 73 (12 1967), 339–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ackerman, James S., “The Demise of the Avant-Garde: Notes on the Sociology of Recent American Art,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (10 1969), 371–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. See note 11, above.

15. The dilemma has been shared by many artists, writers, and college professors since Karl Marx first observed, “In an advanced society the petty bourgeois necessarily becomes from his very position a Socialist on the one side and an economist on the other; that is to say, he is dazed by the magnificence of the big bourgeoisie and has sympathy for the sufferings of the people. He is at once both bourgeois and man of the people. Deep down in his heart he flatters himself that he is impartial and has found the right equilibrium, which claims to be something different from the golden mean. A petty bourgeois of this type glorifies contradiction because contradiction is the quintessence of his being. He is himself nothing but social contradiction in action. He must justify in theory what he is in practice.” Marx to P. V. Annenkov, Brussels, December 28, 1846, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), II, 451.Google Scholar

16. Weeks, , “The Artist,” p. 7Google Scholar, believes the roots of Sloan's socialism can be traced back to his childhood, when he spent Saturdays reading at the Philadelphia Public Library and other days poring over his uncle's print collection of Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Cruickshank.

17. Sloan, Helen Fair, “Introduction,” New York Scene, xvi.Google Scholar

18. Perlman, , The Immortal Eight, p. 55Google Scholar. Regarding Henri and Whitman, see Kwiat, Joseph J., “Robert Henri and the Emerson-Whitman Tradition,” PMLA, 71, No. 4, Part 1 (09 1956), 617–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Helen Farr Sloan in conversation with the author, July 31, 1978.

20. Steffens, Lincoln, “Eugene V. Debs on What the Matter Is in America and What to Do About It,” Everybody's Magazine, 9 (10 1908), 466.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 469.

22. Ibid., p. 461.

23. On March 6, 1910, Sloan wrote in his Diary about the General Strike in Philadelphia: “To read of the trouble makes me feel really ill in sympathy for these people ground down and yet unable to see that only by united political action can they do the right thing for themselves. We are feeling the first throbs of the great Revolution. I'm proud of my old home—cradling the newer greater Liberty for America!” Sloan's statement that he did not want to be doctrinaire is quoted in New York Scene, p. 382Google Scholar. See note 41, below.

24. Helen Farr Sloan in converstaion with the author, August 9, 1978.

25. Regarding the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, see Schnapper, M. B., American Labor: A Pictorial History (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press 1972), p. 358.Google Scholar

26. O'Neill, William L., ed., Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911–1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), p. 17Google Scholar. Regarding The Masses, see also Fitzgerald, , Art and PoliticsGoogle Scholar; Eastman, Max, Enjoyment of Living (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948)Google Scholar; and Young, Art, Art Young: His Life and Times (New York: Sheridan House, 1939).Google Scholar

27. Issues of The Masses can be found in the John Sloan Archives, Delaware Art Museum.

28. Regarding bohemianism at this time, see Wertheim, Arthur Frank, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908–1917 (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1976)Google Scholar, particularly “Part One: Iconoclasm: The Revolt Against the Genteel Tradition.” Fitzgerald, , in Art and Politics, p. 17Google Scholar, maintains that the originality of The Masses was in part due to “the unformed nature of American socialism, with its roots in bohemian revolt, before the impact of the Bolshevik model on the United States.”

29. Bullard, , “John Sloan,” p. 109.Google Scholar

30. The same drawing was also reproduced on the front page of The Call, April 25, 1914. For the July 1914 cover of The Masses, Sloan represented John D. Rockefeller, Jr., whose family had the controlling interest in the mine, attempting to wash from his hands the blood of the women and children murdered when National Guardsmen set fire to their tents pitched after the Ludlow miners had been evicted from their company-owned homes. See Yellen, Samuel, “Bloody Ludlow,” American Labor Struggles: 1877–1934 (New York: Monad Press, 1974), pp. 205–50Google Scholar. First published in 1936.

31. Women appear as supporters for striking men in Direct Action in the January 1913 issue of The Masses. Sloan was also preoccupied with what he considered the failure of organized religion, as noted by Goodrich, Lloyd, John Sloan (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1952), p. 44.Google Scholar

32. See Weeks, , “The Artist,” p. 40Google Scholar, regarding Sloan's candidacy for judge. Sloan's slide away from the Socialist party began about this time, according to Helen Farr Sloan, in conversation with the author on August 9, 1978. Goodrich, , John Sloan, p. 47Google Scholar, states that Sloan left the Socialist Party “within the next few years” after his 1916 break with The Masses. Goodrich adds: “But although no longer active politically, in his thinking and his emotional reactions he remained a socialist to the end of his life, and both in private and public he often expressed himself on that side of issues.”

33. The circumstances of Sloan's leaving The Masses are discussed in Eastman, , Enjoyment, pp. 549–56Google Scholar, and Goodrich, , John Sloan, pp. 45–47Google Scholar. According to Helen Farr Sloan, letter to author of April 3, 1979, Maurice Becker also asked Sloan to attend the meeting.

34. A draft of Sloan's proposal, which enunciated a complete reorganization, is on file at the Sloan Archives, Delaware Art Museum. The issues were not clearcut; on the issue of financial support for the magazine, Sloan was more radical than Eastman. Sloan's last point in the proposal stated: “Let us go to our money contributors for as little as possible. Let us form a committee or ask for volunteers to do this unpleasant work. Let us lift the ‘masses’ out of the Organized Charity class of drains on the purses of the rich.”

35. Quoted in Eastman, , Enjoyment, p. 554.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., p, 555.

37. Ibid., p. 555. Eastman maintained that Maurice Becker also resigned. Fitzgerald, , Art and Politics, 38Google Scholar, n. 37, stated that Becker informed him on July 31, 1968, that he did not walk out, and in fact contributed to three more issues of The Masses.

38. Quoted in Eastman, , Enjoyment, p. 555.Google Scholar

39. Ibid. p. 549.

40. Regarding the decline of the Socialist Party during the war years, see Bell, Daniel, “The Background and Development of Marxian Socialism in the United States,” in Egbert, Donald Drew and Persons, Stow, eds., Socialism and American Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952), I, 291–321Google Scholar. The discussion about the Socialist Party is not necessarily valid about other socialist or Marxist groups of that time.

41. Sloan, John, New York Scene, p. 382.Google Scholar

42. Howells, William Dean, Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1891), p. 128.Google Scholar

43. Caffin, , Story of American Painting, p. 340.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., pp. 343–44.

45. Santayana, George, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926), p. 188Google Scholar. Address delivered in 1911; first published in 1913. I am grateful to Mary Ann Lublin, who several years ago pointed out this quotation to me.

46. I discuss painters of the “genteel tradition” briefly in The Painters' America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810–1910 (New York: Praeger, 1974)Google Scholar and also Turn-of-the-Century America: Paintings, Graphics, Photographs, 1890–1910 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977).Google Scholar

47. Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: New American Library, 1953), p. 126Google Scholar. First published in 1899.

48. Sloan was aware of these painters and their works. On November 8, 1906, Sloan commented in his Diary on the members of the annual jury of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: “The Penn. Academy Jury has Glackens on it, which is fine, but oh, the rest of the list is out today. Redfield, chairman, DeCamp of Boston, Benson of Boston. Oh the poor Boston Brand of American Art! Childe Hassam, who owes debts of kindness to last year's Juries, Julian Story the temporary Philadelphian. Oh sad outlook! Redfield on the Hanging Committee!! S'death.”

49. A pretentiously ambitious yet simplistic and humorless attempt to interpret much of Sloan's work as “evidence of regression to scoptophilic impulses, the original sublimation of which must have led Sloan to become an artist,” is Baker, John's “Voyeurism in the Art of John Sloan: The Psychodynamics of a ‘Naturalistic’ Motif,” The Art Quarterly, New Series 1 (Autumn 1978), 379–95.Google Scholar

50. As Sloan was drawn into politics in 1909, his references to women substantially decrease in that and the following years of the Diary.

51. Sloan's drawing made from this memory was “At the Top of the Swing,” used as the May 1913 cover for The Masses.

52. These notes may later have inspired Sunday Afternoon in Union Square, 1912, Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

53. These notes may have occasioned Nursemaids, Madison Square, 1907Google Scholar, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, the F. M. Hall Collection.

54. First quotation is from Sloan, John, Gist of Art: Principles and Practise Expounded in the Classroom and Studio, recorded with the assistance of Sloan, Helen Farr, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1977), p. xxxiGoogle Scholar. In his Diary, on October 2, 1909, he wrote of seeing a parade of children: “Crowds of children merrymaking always make me sad, rather undefined in origin—perhaps it is the thought of this youth and happiness so soon to be worn away by contact with the social conditions, the grind and struggle for existence—that the few rich may live from their efforts. The struggle to be one of the rich which makes the earnest working slave.” The second quotation is from the original Gist of Art, published in 1939 by American Artists Group, Inc., New York, p. 244.Google Scholar

55. The distinction has to do with the artist's intentions. Many early-twentieth-century artists, intent on expressing the “inner essence” of the thing to be represented, were drawn to theories of empathy, as formulated by the German philosopher Theodore Lipps. Henri, however, stressed personal expression—putting the emphasis on the artist rather than the subject expressed.

56. The remarks were first said on an NBC television program, May 13, 1949, and quoted in Morse, Peter, John Sloan's Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne of Etchings. Lithographs, and Posters. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), p. 141.Google Scholar

57. Moore, George, Impressions and Opinions (London: David Nutt, 1891), p. 318.Google Scholar I am grateful to Alicia Faxon for bringing this particular reference to my attention. Sloan owned Moore's Modern Painters (Sloan Archives). In 1907 he bought Moore's The Lake and read Leaves from My Dead Life and Confessions of a Young Man, all of which were recorded in his Diary.

58. Weeks, , “The Artist,” p. 40Google Scholar. During her research, Weeks studied the records of the Socialist Party's Branch One at the Tamiment Library, New York University.

59. Entry from Sloan's Diary, Sloan Archives, Delaware Art Museum, not published in New York Scene. The Bomb was published in London in 1908 and in New York in 1909. John Quinn, discussed later, owned both copies, which were sold at auction. See Galleries, Anderson, Complete Catalogue of the Library of John Quinn (New York, 1924)Google Scholar, Lots 3845 and 3846. In spot-checking the ellipses in the published Diary, that is, Bruce St. John's edited New York Scene, I found few instances as interesting as this remark by Sloan. Often the omissions have to do with addresses of artists, the food he ate, and the like; nevertheless, the serious researcher would find it necessary to peruse the original.

60. A breakdown of the kinds and numbers of paintings done by Sloan can be found in Holcomb, Grant III, “A Catalogue Raisonnee of the Paintings of John Sloan, 1900–1913,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Delaware, 1972Google Scholar. Briefly: between 1904 and 1908 Sloan painted 24 genre paintings, 15 portraits, and 45, mostly small, landscapes; between 1909 and 1913, he painted 31 genre scenes, 34 portraits, 9 landscapes and 11 paintings of the female nude. Helen Farr Sloan reminded the author in a letter April 3, 1979, that the later works are distinctly lighter in palette.

61. Henri, 's philosophy at this time was expressed in his article, “Progress in Our National Art Must Spring from the Development of Individuality of Ideas and Freedom of Expression: A Suggestion for a New Art School,” The Craftsman, 15 (01 1909), 386–401Google Scholar. See also Kwiat, Joseph J., “Robert Henri and the Emerson-Whitman Tradition.”Google Scholar But Henri remained an active member of the conservative National Academy of Design.

62. The Sloans did not warm to Marjory Henri, whom they met on October 29, 1908. At their second meeting, on November 3, Sloan commented: “Mrs. H. does not seem to show any hopeful signs on second meeting. I can not see what intellectual help she could be, nor economical household assistance—nor can I even feel that she is beautiful as an ornament.” Sloan was being ironic in his remark about her as “an ornament.”

63. Quoted in Van Wyck Brooks, , John Sloan: A Painter's Life (New York: Dutton, 1955), p. 114Google Scholar. Brooks incorrectly states (p. 101) that the meeting took place in the summer of 1908. He emphasizes Yeats's influence on Sloan, which Helen Farr Sloan confirmed in several conversations with the author during 1978. For another detailed discussion, see Gordon, Robert, John Butler Yeats and John Sloan: The Records of a Friendship (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1978)Google Scholar, a shorter version of which was published in the Art Journal, Vol. 32 (Spring 1973).Google Scholar

64. Brooks, , John Sloan, p. 121.Google Scholar

65. Quoted by Sloan, Helen Farr, New York Scene, p. 339.Google Scholar

66. The Water Color Society rejected four of them for being “vulgar” and “indecent.” See Morse, , John Sloan–s Prints, p. 134.Google Scholar

67. See also Reid, B. L., The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 86.Google Scholar

68. Letter from Sloan to Quinn, dated November 24, 1912, New York Public Library. Reprinted with the permission of Helen Farr Sloan and the John Quinn Memorial Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

69. Letter from Quinn to Sloan, dated January 2, 1913, carbon copy on file in the New York Public Library. Reprinted with the permission of the John Quinn Memorial Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

70. Letter from Sloan to Quinn, dated January 23, 1913, New York Public Library. Reprinted with the permission of Helen Farr Sloan and the John Quinn Memorial Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

71. Letter from Quinn to Sloan, dated January 24, 1913, carbon copy on file in the New York Public Library. Reprinted with the permission of the John Quinn Memorial Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

72. Quinn, as an early patron of twentieth-century modernism, was an enthusiast interested in converting his American friends. It is not known, however, which version of the manifesto he gave Sloan. The manifesto is not listed in the Anderson Galleries' sale catalogue for Quinn's library.

73. Letter from Sloan to Quinn, dated November 21, 1914, New York Public Library. Reprinted with the permission of Helen Farr Sloan and the John Quinn Memorial Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

74. Sloan, in October 1913, ran an advertisement in The Masses offering his New York etchings for sale, but he received not one order. In February 1915 he sent about 1,600 sales-promotional brochures to institutions and individuals culled from Who's Who. This venture was almost equally unsuccessful, with only two sales made. See Morse, , John Sloan's Prints, p. 17.Google Scholar

75. The Maratta system was described in Sloan's Diary, June 13, 1909: “A regularly gradated sequence; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple with the same ‘intervals’ and a low keyed set of ‘hues’ of the same colors. Henri thinks there are great possibilities. The palette which a painter uses now [earth hues and mineral colors], certainly has big jumps in it.” Several references to the Maratta system in his Diary were edited out of the published New York Scene.

76. Quoted in Brooks, , John Sloan, p. 123.Google Scholar

77. Quoted ibid., p. 134.

78. See note 18 above. It is not known whether Sloan at this time knew of the works of Kathe Kollwitz, the preeminent early-twentieth-century artist of social protest, whose etchings are biting indictments of the workers' plight.

79. Sloan in conversation with Joseph J. Kwiat on November 30, 1948, quoted in Kwiat, , “Robert Henri,” p. 620.Google Scholar