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Friday, July 9, 2010

Newark Museum In-Depth Art Lectures & Symposia

If you are interested in learning about a particular artist and artistic "school," the Newark Museum has scheduled a full-day program that's just for you!

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

John Sloan and the Ashcan artists depicted New York City with extraordinary attention to local details. Yet the artists’ sensitivity to specific places can make us forget that in the early 20th century New York City was shaped by global and local forces. Immigration, international currents in popular culture, and, finally, the First World War, all made and remade life on New York streets. New York City in the years of Sloan and the other Ashcan artists is an inspiring and sobering example of the urban intersections of the global and the local. (MacSorley's Saloon by John Sloan pictured above.)

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.