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John Sloan's Veiled Politics and Art1
By Gail Gelburd, Eastern Connecticut State University
During the 1909 New York mayoral campaign, the Socialist newspaper, the New York Call, published a series of seven political cartoons signed by Josh Nolan. Analysis of the subject and style of these cartoons suggest that the signature on them was an anagrammatic pseudonym for painter John Sloan, a leading figure of the Ash Can School and later art director for the Masses. Sloan confirms this in his diary, which provides the reader with evidence of the painter's inclination to use anagrams and fictitious names. The cartoons document a forgotten aspect of the artist's career and reveal many of his political and aesthetic influences. The images also explicate Sloan's personal political commitments and the origins of his later unique imagery. This essay examines Sloan's early cartoons, while questioning why Sloan would choose to hide his identity when creating images for the New York Call.
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During the first decades of the twentieth century, artists, writers, anarchists, and socialists built an intellectual community of radical expression in Greenwich Village. Their collective voice created an air of optimism and vitality in which they believed that they could effect change for the workers of America. A radical press flourished based on these ideals, and artists visualized the politics of poverty, the rights of workers, suffragist goals, and candidate issues, for the Masses, Appeal to Reason, and the New York Call. John Sloan, a recent transplant from Philadelphia, became the art editor of the Masses and a frequent contributor to many of the other journals. Most studies devoted to Sloan focus on the art that he created for the Masses and emphasize that his politics were only manifested in his art from 1912 to 1916. An in-depth survey of the various publications that were part of the "radical press," in conjunction with a study of Sloan's diary and personal correspondence, reveals that Sloan was actually creating political cartoons for the left-wing press three years earlier. As early as August 23, 1909, John Sloan drew radical political cartoons—but under a fictitious name. The seven political cartoons that appeared under his anagrammatic pseudonym in the New York Call are didactic, and most satirized the specific candidates of the New York City mayoral campaign of 1909. These cartoons introduced a style that borrowed from the masters of political art and yet initiated a new format for political cartooning. Acknowledgement of this political imagery raises questions about why the artist chose to not use his own name and the reaction of the art community to these works. To understand these cartoons, it is important to scrutinize the images, review the sources of his politics and art, and consider the relationship between his political cartoons and his nonpolitical paintings. The neglected images that Sloan devised for the New York Call beckon us to view the power of the political image and its complicated place within the art world of the Progressive Era. |
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A graphic artist turned painter, John Sloan is best known as the artist who developed paintings and etchings of working-class people in New York City. A participant in what has been referred to as the "Ash Can School" or "The Eight," John Sloan shocked the art world with his paintings of the oppressed and the homeless, the poor and the workers, prostitutes and bar scenes, rather than the more usual scenes of the elite. He began his career by contributing illustrations to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Press, Colliers, Scribners, Everybody's, Harper's Weekly, and the Saturday Evening Post. Sloan's goal was to explain a text, incident, or idea through the details and to use the stroke of a pencil to tell a story. His illustrations were not political cartoons, but often contained underlying sociological content such as the inequities of the rich and the poor. |
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