America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Eight West Eighth

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The Whitney Museum of American Art was established as a place for artists, a legacy it has cherished since its earliest incarnation as the Whitney Studio—an exhibition space opened by the artist and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1914 in a townhouse at Eight West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. With the energetic support of her assistant, Juliana Force, in 1918 she transformed the Studio into the Whitney Studio Club, which was a home for American artists then disdained by the conservative establishment. Over the next decade, the Studio Club expanded into the neighboring townhouses that together served as a social and creative hub for its artist-members. Force regularly organized exhibitions, lectures, and classes and provided American artists financial support (and food and drink) with the backing of Mrs. Whitney.

The works on view in this chapter evoke the diverse activities of the Studio Club, as well as the broad tastes of these two remarkable women. Paintings by Robert Henri, William Glackens, John Sloan, and George Luks are evidence of Mrs. Whitney’s adventurous early advocacy of a group of mavericks known as “The Eight,” proponents of the so-called Ashcan School who favored gritty urban realism. Photographs by Charles Sheeler and Berenice Abbott capture the townhouses’ interiors and the exhibitions held therein, while humorous drawings by Guy Pène du Bois chronicle the characters on the scene. A group of Edward Hopper’s figure studies from life-drawing class there affirm that the Studio Club was a site not just for exhibiting art but for making it. When the Whitney Museum of American Art was founded in 1931, with a collection donated by Mrs. Whitney and with Juliana Force as its first director, the institution’s identity and mission as the artist’s museum were already firmly in place.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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John Sloan (1871-1951), Backyards, Greenwich Village, 1914

John Sloan, Backyards, Greenwich Village, 1914

In America Is Hard to See

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John Sloan, Backyards, Greenwich Village, 1914

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Narrator: This painting by John Sloan is called Backyards, Greenwich Village. 

Adam Weinberg: I’m Adam Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

The painting is a wonderful view out of his studio window on Perry Street, just eight blocks from the current site of the Whitney Museum. And this is a view of a rather poor neighborhood, but he shows it with a sense of energy and glee. You have children who are building a snowman sketched in the background, a cat who has actually the most remarkable shadow painted next to it, that’s trudging lithely through the whiteness of the snow. But probably the highlights of this painting are the little girl in the window with this great smile and her ruby lips and her bright eyes, and the cat who is dead center in the foreground, who actually looks a lot like the little girl in the window, with an equally big smile. 

Narrator: To modern eyes, this painting may almost seem sentimental. But at the time, American artists typically painted more “elevated” subjects—like society portraits, landscapes, and classical scenes. Sloan’s focus on life in the tenements—laundry and all—was quite progressive for his time. Many of the artists that Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney championed shared this focus on the realities of urban life. Their subject matter—as well as the dark, smoky palette they often favored—prompted critics to call them The Ashcan School.

John Sloan was devoted to creating art from what he observed in the streets of New York City, finding "beauty in commonplace things and people." In his paintings, he portrayed tenements, colorful neighborhood characters, and bustling crowds—all subjects deemed vulgar by the art establishment. He was, as he put it, "in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at all." Backyards, Greenwich Village, a work that Sloan developed from pencil sketches made from the window of his apartment on West 4th Street, evinces the artist’s keen powers of observation. Here, a private scene of two children building a snowman in a backyard, with a pair of cats and another child watching them from a window above, brings dignity and romance to lives that would otherwise go unnoticed. A depiction of children, cats, and laundry flapping in the breeze might seem nostalgic and even charming by today's standards, but in its time Sloan’s work signaled a forceful challenge to academic norms in its rejection of refined subject matter and its emphasis on aestheticizing the everyday.

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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