Ripples

Works by John Sloan and his students hang together in an exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum

- By James D. Balestrieri

Don Freeman (1908-1978), The Peacock Dance, ca. 1941. Crayon and graphite on paper, sheet: 11 x 8% in. Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1978 Roy Freeman.

When you take in the array of prints and paintings in John Sloan and His Students, the new exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum, you realize, with some incredulity, just how many notable American artists studied under him at the Art Students League in New York from 1914, when he first began to teach there, and 1932, his last year at the League. The list reads like a who's who of American painting, printmaking, illustration and design, including names like Peggy Bacon, Isabel Bishop, Don Freeman, Reginald Marsh, John Graham, Selma Gubin, Alexander Calder and Adolph Gottlieb. Not all of these are household names— at least in households where American art history is a topic of discussion—but their work shows that John Sloan's influence was outsized, spanning the time of The Eight, the Ashcan School, the Armory Show, art as political activism, the shift to the Southwest and Taos, the rise of the American Scene and the WPA era, and reaching even into abstract expressionism post-World War II. When you realize that Sloan, by his own admission, was not a terribly successful artist, you really have to marvel at the myriad ways in which his drawing style, especially in his figurative work, and his approach to composition, makes subtle—and sometimes not-so-subtle appearances in the works of his students.