I enjoyed this short video essay by New York Times writer Roberta Smith, in which she muses about a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that she had passed often without really stopping to look.

After realizing that what she thought was a picture of women socializing was actually a studio visit with an artist, her model and another woman who is presumably a patron or friend of the artist, she got thinking about several other paintings in the museum which portray artists in the studio or at work.

Here are links to the Met’s pages for the works she mentions and shows in the essay:

In the Studio by Alfred Stevens (image above)

The American School by Matthew Pratt

Woman Seated at an Easel by Georges Braque

Chance Encounter at 3AM by Red Grooms

Self-Portrait With a Friend by Edward Vuillard is not in the Met’s collection, it was in a special exhibit Smith was on her way to view when the idea occurred to her. I haven’t been able to locate it with a quick search, but there are lots of Vuillard images here and resources here.

Though, of all of the paintings on view at the Met of artists working (or not), I’m surprised Smith didn’t include a painting that immediately springs to my mind when I think of artists engaged in drawing or painting, Young Woman Drawing, by Marie-Denise Villers, which I wrote about here.

[Link via Art Notes]

Let’s see if I can get the math right on this, let alone the connections.

John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn, who are sometimes referred to as the “Philadelphia Four”, were central to the group of upstart artists who critics in the early part of the 20th Century would mockingly dub “The Ashcan School”.

The four had common backgrounds as illustrators for The Philadelphia Inquirer and the The Philadelphia Press and attended classes at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Sloan went to high school at Central High in Philadelphia, along with Glackens and Albert C. Barnes, who would later establish the Barnes Foundation. Sloan and Glackens went on to study at the Academy. Among their instructors was Thomas Anshutz, who, as the leading student of Thomas Eakins, inherited Eakins’ mantle when the latter was forced from the school.

Sloan eventually met another influential student of Anshutz, Robert Henri, a strong willed and charismatic artist who preached rebellion from the constraints of academic art.

Henri encouraged the four to pursue careers as gallery artists, paint honestly what they saw in life, particularly contemporary urban life, and suggested they study European artists like Frans Hals, Goya, Valázquez, and Manet.

The five painters eventually relocated, one by one, to New York. In 1908 the five artists from Philadelphia mounted a joint exhibition with three other artists, Authur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast and Ernest Lawson. The exhibition was in part a protest against their rejection by art critics of the time. Though they only exhibited as a group one time, it earned them the title of “The Eight”.

The label of “Ashcan School” was applied to the five painters from Philadelphia for their portrayal of gritty scenes of urban life, tenement houses, the poor and lower working class, which were considered unfit subjects for paintings by the art establishment.

The “Ashcan School” (a term used more in retrospect than at the time, and never by the artists to refer to themselves), was in part a rebellion against academic art and in part a refutation of the other upstart movement in American art, American Impressionism.

The Ashcan artists adopted a darker palette and rejected the more genteel subject matter of the Impressionist influenced painters. The latter style (or group of styles) also had a focus in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the form of New Hope artists (see my posts on Daniel Garber and Fern Coppedge), and in New York and Boston in the form of “The Ten” (see my posts on Childe Hassam, Edmund Tarbell, J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twatchman).

Even though, like those painters, Sloan and his compatriots painted traditional landscape subjects, portraits and figurative work, they are mostly noted for their images of the rough unpolished textures of city life, rooftops, side streets, alleyways, elevated trains, clotheslines, tenement stoops, back yards, bars and brothels.

Sloan is sometimes thought of as a socially oriented painter, and for a time was involved in Socialist groups, but he said he disliked “propaganda” in paintings and that his scenes were done with “sympathy, but no social consciousness”.

Unlike many of his associates, and perhaps most of the American Impressionist painters, Sloan was not a facile painter. He painted slowly and methodically, and was more likely to finish his paintings in the studio from location sketches and notes than to paint them “en plein air”. Sloan shared Hopper’s technique of painting out of windows, sometimes using the window as a framing device.

Still his paintings carry an uncanny feeling of place and atmosphere, particularly in catching subdued light and subtle color shifts of rain and fog, or the colors of night in the city.

Sloan was also prolific as an etcher; and I think his etchings, and the graphic elements in his paintings, in which he often flattened forms with almost solid areas of color, had a distinct impact on mid-20th Century illustration, as well as other painters of his time and after.

Sloan taught at the Art Students League for over ten years, and for a short time at the George Luks Art School. His students included Alexander Calder, Reginald Marsh, Peggy Bacon, and Barnett Newman.

Though his paintings bring high prices at auction today, he sold few during his lifetime and reportedly told his students, “I have nothing to teach you that will help you to make a living”.

The Delaware Art Museum, a gem of a small museum that I’ve mentioned before in my posts on Howard Pyle and the Pre-Raphaelites, has a terrific collection of Sloan and his contemporaries, largely due to a bequest from Helen Farr Sloan, the artist’s second wife.

The museum has organized a traveling exhibition, Seeing the City: Sloan’s New York that is currently at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago until September 14, 2008, and will then travel to the Renolda House Museum of American Art in North Carolina from October 4, 2008 to January 4, 2009.

The exhibit has a dedicated web site, which features an extensive gallery of Sloan’s work, extensive biographical information, resources and other features, like Sloan’s new York Then and Now, that lets you compare his paintings, or period photographs of where he lived and painted, with modern photographs of the same scenes.

There is also a book published to accompany the exhibit, John Sloan’s New York. Sloan published a book of his teaching called Gist of Art, which I believe has been republished recently as John Sloan on Drawing and Painting.

One of the best online sources for Sloan’s work is The Athenaeum, which has a nice selection of 41 works, reproduced larger than elsewhere and with a good color balance. Click on the thumbnail for a dedicated page, then again for the larger image.

Sloan, whether as a member of the Philadelphia Four (or Five), or of The Eight, was one of a small number of artists who helped define a new way of seeing and painting.

I will often write about artists here on lines and colors whose work I have only seen in digital reproduction on the web. It’s always preferable, though. when I can see the actual work in person, and even better on those rare occasions when I get to meet and speak with the artist.

I wrote about Maine artist Colin Page about a year ago, when he last had a show at the F.A.N. Gallery here in Philadelphia. I did have chance to see his work in person on that occasion, catching his essentially sold-out show on its last day.

This year I was able to make the opening of the new show last Friday, as the First Friday Old City gallery walk was in progress in the midst of the city’s July 4th events.

I was pleased to have the chance to meet Colin and talk with him about his palette, his approach to plein air painting, color theory and his direction in terms of new subjects.

We also talked briefly about his decision to work a bit larger at times, and in more open compositions. Scale is one of those things that you can’t readily get a feeling for when viewing images online (or in print, for that matter), and it makes a difference in your impression of a painting.

Another aspect of looking at paintings that I am often frustrated with when viewing images of paintings rather than originals is the surface texture, the physical character of the way the paint is applied, particularly in impressionistic or painterly realist works.

Page’s work, in particular, has a wonderful appeal in the brush strokes and texture of the paint on the canvas. His lively, remarkably free brush handling, which actually seems to have gotten looser and more confident over the past year, gives his canvasses a kind of textural sparkle that is an integral part of their character when seen in person, but doesn’t often come through in reproductions.

This is one of the reasons that my suggestion to artists like Colin, and many others who show their work on the web, would be to post a few large images, or at least some detail shots, that show more clearly the character of the painted surface.

It also helps, I think, to supplement images of paintings which have been photographed with flat lighting, in an attempt to show the work lit as evenly as possible, with additional images intentionally lit at an angle to show the dimensionality of the paint.

Up close, Page’s paintings are dappled with crisp, textural strokes of brilliant color, that can look almost haphazard, but, on stepping back resolve beautifully into his intended subject. His broader areas of color, when seen up close, likewise break up into fascinating combinations of vivid hues, that can almost seem unrelated at times, but from a normal viewing distance blend optically to make a clear and perfect tone.

He applies his technique, and his terrific knack for strong compositional geometry, to subjects in rural Maine and urban Philadelphia. His trips here to visit family afford him the opportunity to paint the urban landscape, which he describes as a refreshing change from the subject matter in the rural area where he lives. I particularly like the way he uses patches of light and shade in his urban subjects to control and organize the patterns of color that make up the scene, giving focus and depth to what might otherwise be a chaotic jumble of shapes.

You can see a gallery of his work on his web site. You will also find additional paintings on his blog (journal), to which he has been posting with increasing frequency, along with occasional works in progress and thoughts on painting and technique.

In addition, there is a selection of Page’s work on the F.A.N. Gallery web site. (The F.A.N. is one of the few galleries in Philadelphia that I count on to consistently show work that I find interesting.)

Colin Page: Recent Paintings runs at the F.A.N. Gallery until July 26, 2008.

www.colinpagepaintings.com

Colin Page at F.A.N. Gallery