|
LDR Home
Books
CDs
Events/Exhibits
Film/Video
|
John Sloan on Drawing and Painting: Gist of Art
By John Sloan
Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, U.S.A., 2000.
200 pp., paper.
ISBN 0-486-40947-3.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart , IA 52224-9767, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net
To understand this volume, a reprint of a famous book titled Gist of Art (first published in 1939), it is helpful to realize the prominence of John Sloan (1871-1951), an American painter, printmaker and teacher. Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he was a close associate of Robert Henri (who authored an earlier, popular book on The Art Spirit, 1923) and other members of a group of painters called The Eight. Also known as the Ashcan School, these artists believed that an artist should show not just the affable aspects of life but the putrid and seamier portions as well. An influential teacher at the Art Students League in New York from 1916 to about 1938, among his well-known students were Aaron Bohrod, Reginald Marsh, Eric Sloane (who changed his name to Sloane, with an e on the end, in honor of his teacher), Alexander Calder, Kimon Nicolaides, Adolf Gottlieb, John Graham, and Barnett Newman. This new edition of the notes and observations distilled from his long years of teaching is supplemented by a detailed chronology of his life, 46 illustrations, and an introduction by Helen Farr Sloan, a student whom Sloan later married.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 16, No. 3, Spring 2001.)
top
|
