John Sloan and the Ashcan Artists: Picturing the City
Monday: July 19, 10:00 AM–4:00 PM
Full Day: $35 members; $45 non-members; $25 morning or afternoon only
$15 optional box lunch (must be ordered by July 15)
Pre-registration required. Purchase tickets online, send mail-in registration form (PDF), or call 973.596.6613.
9:30–10:00 AM Check-in and coffee/tea reception in Engelhard Court
10:00 am–12:30 PM Morning Session
Welcome and Introduction
Lecture: A City in the World: John Sloan and the Ashcan Artists
Speaker: Robert W. Snyder, Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark
Lecture: Mapping the City with the Ashcan School
Speaker: Rebecca Zurier, Associate Professor of the History of Art, Univ. of Michigan
With their training as news illustrators and their commitment to fusing art with "Real Life," the artists of the Ashcan School proved insightful interpreters of the modern city. This talk deploys tools from cultural geography as well as art history to examine what their art can tell us about the changing experience of urban space in the early twentieth century and beyond.
12:30–1:45 PM Lunch
2:00–4:00 PM Afternoon Session
Lecture: Lust for Looking: Sloan, Cinema and the City
Speaker: Katherine Manthorne, Professor of Art History, Graduate Center, SUNY
This presentation develops the proto-cinematic atmosphere that permeated Robert Henri’s circle, and then focuses on John Sloan’s engagement with this increasingly popular medium. Beginning with an article he wrote soon after film’s debut in Philadelphia in the 1890s, and continuing through the 1920s, Sloan responded to each new phase of movies’ rapid development. Film’s pictorial narrative and manner of viewing the world encouraged Sloan’s habits of vision as a “spectator of modern life.” Folding the artist’s movie-going into an analysis of his picture-making, we better understand his lust for looking.
Lecture: John Sloan: Figuring the Painter
Speaker: Michael Lobel, Associate Professor of Art History, SUNY Purchase
John Sloan, like many of his fellow Ashcan School artists, started out as a newspaper illustrator. For this reason, his pictures have often been read as veritable snapshots of life in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. This lecture will challenge the reportorial view of Sloan’s work by examining some of his best-known paintings in order to show how they offer a self-conscious and extended reflection on the art of painting.