Robert Henri and his pupils were the most progressive painters in America—for all of five years. In 1908 Henri’s Young Turks were the scourge of the art establishment, radicals who defiantly formed the Eight after being snubbed at the incestuous annual exhibit of the National Academy of Design. In 1913 they were conservative also-rans, whose submissions at New York’s Armory Show revealed just how far America lagged behind the modernism of Europe. Such is the conventional view of American art history.

Of course, during this time the work of the Eight had changed not one bit. Its gritty realism still reeked of journalism and the pavement, which was after all its métier, reflecting the habits of men who had toiled as newspaper sketch artists and who had spent more time recording fires and arrests than in academic life study. During the 1890s, half of the future Eight had worked for Philadelphia dailies, where they learned to make forceful compositions out of the most unpromising subjects, and to do it swiftly and tersely. This training sank into their bones, and it is everywhere apparent in their subsequent paintings: William Glackens, who found his subjects at restaurants and race tracks; Everett Shinn, who lurked backstage at the ballet or in orchestra pits; George Luks, with his charmless renditions of livestock and heaving wrestlers, rotated to the least picturesque angle. But above all it was John Sloan whose urban vignettes earned the group the designation Ashcan School.

Since at least 1934, when Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., published Art in America, the Ashcan School has been recognized as a way station of modernism, though more so for its challenge to the academy than for its technique and subject matter. Its significance was purely transitional, a crucial link in the Darwinian chain of modernism before 1913, but afterwards irrelevant. Unfortunately, the Ashcan dinosaur refused to evolve—or to become extinct. Until Henri’s death in 1929, he and Sloan continued to paint as they always had, making few concessions to changing fashions. This friendship, and the affectionate and whimsical correspondence that sustained it, is the subject of Revolutionaries of Realism: The Letters of John Sloan and Robert Henri.

The two friends were quite different in temperament. Henri was a rough and tumble character, the son of a Nebraska real estate promoter who tangled repeatedly with cattlemen, shooting one to death in a brawl. The family fled and at the age of seventeen Robert Henry Cozad became Robert Henri (pronounced hen-rye), an alias he lived under for the rest of his life. Four years later, he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and later studied at the Académie Julian, that Parisian stable for grooming would-be John Singer Sargents. Sloan was Henri’s genteel foil: a shy bookstore cashier, he improvised an art education over a few semesters spent copying antique casts, which he detested. In rebellion he formed the short-lived Charcoal Club, a cooperative group of young artists who paid a fee for a model and studio space; Henri agreed to serve as critic, cementing what was to be a lifelong friendship with Sloan.

The surviving correspondence is reproduced here in its entirety, with spare but highly useful editorial comments. (Or almost in its entirety; inexplicably a Sloan letter dated February 14, 1900, does not appear, although Bennard B. Perlman, the editor of this volume, quotes it in his excellent study The Immortal Eight: American Painting from Eakins to the Armory Show.) Moreover, Perlman handsomely reproduces almost every drawing or painting alluded to in the letters, and also reproduces in facsimile many of the letters and cards; almost nothing is left out. For a project of its kind, the book is a model of conscientiousness, yet, for all this, it remains somehow deeply unsatisfying. To understand why this is so is to glimpse the strengths and peculiar limitations of these profoundly un-Bohemian artists.

The letters reveal an intimate but unequal friendship. Like his restless father, Henri remained the itinerant cowboy, disappearing from town at will, often leaving Sloan in the lurch to handle the business accounts and pay his bills. In 1898, while in Paris, Henri received word that Sloan had moved in with “a common woman.” His advice to his friend: “sometimes one has to run away to get out of such affairs.” Sloan did not run way, and three years later married the woman. Henri, for his part, was always ready to run, and his most poignant flight came in 1913, following the Armory Show. Henri had every right to expect to be counted among the luminaries of the show, but when he was upstaged by the French and German modernists, he slipped into a funk. Fleeing to Ireland, he brooded for five months. Over the next two years, neither painter had much to communicate, and Henri’s group, never a tightly organized band, fell apart. This episode, about which we want to know more, is a void which the book skips over.

Sloan was the less gifted artist, particularly weak in his figures, which remain rather generalized and amorphous. While his etchings were often quite strong tonal compositions, he never quite found freedom in oil painting. Even his best canvases, such as Wake of the Ferry or Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, never fulfill the potential of fully realized oil compositions, and still have the air of illustration about them, something of a diagrammatic quality. What he knew of modern French painting came second hand, filtered through Henri. Still, he had a sharp eye for the group composition—the legacy of his newspaper days— and his work always retained its prying voyeurism, as he prowled tenement rooftops, peering over fire escapes to find his unwitting subjects. It is precisely this sensibility he passed on to Edward Hopper, who capitalized on the voyeurism, although he also inherited something of Sloan’s slapdash brushwork.

Henri was the more successful artist, and understood better how to work within the limits of his ability. While in Paris in the 1890s, he learned to paint street scenes in a capable post-Impressionist manner, and with some success, selling his work La Neige to the French government in 1899. Returning to New York he strove to find an American counterpart to the Parisian scenes. He reinterpreted La Neige as West 57th Street, New York (1902), his finest urban view, only to give up the genre several years later. For the rest of his career, his work comprises chiefly portraits, full length at first, but by the 1910s nearly exclusively head-and-shoulder portraits, very often of children, whom he had a rare genius for putting at ease.

Against this backdrop the correspondence unfolds, not only tracing the artists’ friendship but casting new light on their professional relationship. Sloan emerges as Henri’s perennial student, deferring to him in matters artistic until the end. Henri’s advice invariably ran in the same channel: to strip a composition down to its essence, and to maximize the pictorial vitality. When Sloan sent a photograph of his half-completed East Entrance, City Hall, Philadelphia (1901) for criticism, Henri immediately exhorted Sloan to “get the figures below to give as much of that eternal business of life —going in and coming out.” Nearly two decades later he was still encouraging Sloan to pare down his details:  

You have an unusual gift of memory, both of sensations and sight, and while these years of more or less direct transcript—painting before the subject—may be considered the most excellent information gathering—and very useful—I’m quite certain your best work will come from dealing with the memories which have stuck with you after what is unessential —to you—in experiences have dropped away … There comes a time when it is better to have the model sit down behind you instead of in front so that you can go ahead.

Here we get a glimpse of what Henri must have been like as a studio critic—cajoling, extemporizing, entertaining (and also repeating himself, for he reiterates the same lesson nearly word for word elsewhere in the letter). There are also some arresting personal asides, such as Stuart Davis worrying about his draft number in World War I, or an account of watching Isadora Duncan dance. Likewise, there are tales of the artists’ colony in Santa Fe, which both men (and their friend George Bellows) adopted as a kind of second home in the late Teens.

All this is engaging and highly readable, for both artists were witty letter writers. Nonetheless, the letters do not quite tell a continuous story, which readers will find frustrating; the correspondence is intermittent and sketchy, flaring into life when the artists were separated, then falling silent, usually just as things are getting interesting. But it is when it comes to talking about their own art that these voluble letter writers disappoint most.

Toward the end of his life, Henri organized his thoughts into The Art Spirit (1923), as much an inspirational sermon as a manual for the aspiring artist. A good portion of the book was given over to suggestions for how technique and artistic expression might be harmonized, which was perhaps the central concern of Henri’s teaching. In one characteristic passage he urged portrait painters to see the eyebrow as a single expressive line, and to paint it fluidly, rather than to fuss over the individual hairs. Such no-nonsense pronouncements, always with a practical application, are the closest Henri ever came to explaining his philosophy of painting.

Even in a torrent of words, as there is in these letters, one misses any sense, even a hint, of an inner life. And all the excellent visual material that accompanies the letters cannot make up for this gap. The truth is, these high-spirited, infectiously cheerful artists were not deeply introspective. They seldom thought in abstract terms, and they never strayed near even the outermost precincts of theory. If their painting was modern, it was a modernism without program, depending for its meaning upon no manifesto or explicit ideological program. Nor did it rest on a political platform. Sloan may have dabbled in leftist politics and been a socialist by conviction, contributing to the radical magazine The Masses, but his paintings remain strikingly apolitical. While it is virtually a physical impossibility for a modern viewer to stand in front of a Sloan work and speak about it for sixty seconds without lapsing into a commentary on social issues, Sloan had quite different intentions. For all his political engagement, he painted with the neutral, appraising eye of the reporter. He was not, however, a muckraker: like Degas, who used the accidental poses of his faceless ballerinas and bathers to explore abstract form, Sloan presented his hairdressers and shop girls as a way of exploring the city, not reforming it.

And here is the paradox that runs through the careers of Henri and Sloan. In every sense, they were products of Quaker Philadelphia, a profoundly anti-theoretical city whose tradition was empiricism in the sciences and humanities, and realism in the arts. The scientific realism of Thomas Eakins dominated the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts long after his own unhappy tenure, and Henri and Sloan were marinated in it. They were Academy realists, even as they struggled against it, and they absorbed its unquestioned belief in the observed world as the central subject of art.

At the same time, they were products of Paris, the Paris of the 1890s, which gave them their technique and their attitude. They admired and borrowed from Cézanne and the post-Impressionists. Rejecting Eakins’s airless brushwork, they learned to paint wet, and to make thick descriptive brush strokes that rose to turbulent impasto. Out of these two sources they cobbled their artistic identity. Thus they painted modern life, believing themselves therefore to be modernists. When they drew up their barricades against the tyranny of the academy and arbiters of taste like Kenyon Cox, they saw their enemy on the right; and when they were outflanked in 1913 on their left, they were rather bewildered, the orphaned Mensheviks of the artistic revolution.

By making them into modernists, and then pronouncing them as failures, critics such as Barr engaged in polemical sleight-of-hand. The goal of Henri’s group was not a radical break with the past, but reform from within, and they should not be judged for failing to follow through on what was never their intention. Nor were they the only artists in the world who found themselves in this position. This was particularly true of artists in Germany, which also tended to absorb radical French ideas rapidly, while buffering them with the weight of well-established, indigenous traditions. It is against these artists that Henri and Sloan ought to be measured, not Kandinsky, but older German masters such as Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, who are likewise now in the process of an overdue reassessment.

This is the tragedy of Henri and Sloan, but it also makes them far more interesting painters than those fickle young counterparts of theirs who immediately leapt onto the Armory bandwagon. If their correspondence shows a scarcity of theoretical calculation, it is offset by their rollicking self-confidence. And surely, after all, it was this very indifference to theory and fashion that inoculated them from much of the shallow faddism that rent American modernism in the wake of the Armory Show, when an armada’s worth of canvas was sacrificed for pale pastiches of Duchamp, Matisse, and Picabia.

Notes
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The Eight also included three artists who cannot properly be considered Ashcan School painters, although they shared their frustration with the National Academy: Ernest Lawson, Arthur B. Davies, and Maurice Prendergast. Go back to the text.

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