Seeing the City: Sloan’s New York
May 22 – September 14, 2008
Installation view
John Sloan's images of New York helped define the city in the popular imagination. In gritty depictions of urban life, Sloan celebrated the metropolis of New York by focusing on street scenes, elevated trains, public spaces, and the lives of ordinary Americans.
Yet Sloan's vision was a subjective one, tied to his particular observations of the neighborhoods in which he lived and the individuals he encountered. More than a series of distinct locations, Sloan's images of New York reflect the artist’s own movement through and experience of the city.
Organized by the Delaware Art Museum, this exhibition gathers together a wealth of material in all media from 1900 to the 1930s—on loan from various public and private collections—in order to demonstrate the correlation between where Sloan created his art and what he depicted.
Seeing the City maps Sloan's New York, locating precisely the sites portrayed in his work and examining the personal meaning tied to the places he chose to depict again and again.
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