From illustration to Ashcan: an artist’s career in an age of transition

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Newspapers were once illustrated with drawings, so what happened to the artists when the camera took over?

John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration by Michael Lobel

A new study puts readers into the world of US newspapers, journals and periodicals in the 1890–1915 era, at a time when drawing, half-tone reproduction and photographic reproduction were illustrating news, features and advertisements. This was a transitional period, during which drawing gave way to photography in topical publications; one in which the ‘black-and-white men’ moved from being central to the periodical industry to being marginal figures. Photo-mechanical methods, which had at first aided illustrators, increasingly came to supplant and eventually entirely displace the black-and-white men. Professor Michael Lobel of State University of New York suggests that it was the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 that accelerated the demand for the actuality of photography over the artist’s impressions that had previously illustrated news reporting.

Lobel begins by outlining the work of illustrators in this period. They had to fulfil multiple roles: drawing from imagination (there was rarely enough time for an artist to draw at the scene), combining photographs into drawn tableaux, copying photographs, devising puzzles and drawing fashion-design plates and cartoons. They had to be flexible and work fast. Few were lucky enough to specialize sufficiently to avoid the menial end of the illustration spectrum, though a handful became household names and earned small fortunes from national weeklies in America and from syndication.

John Sloan (1871–1951) started as an illustrator and cartoonist. He made a living from commercial drawings and later became a significant figure in early 20th-century American art. As an illustrator for Philadelphian journals, Sloan drew portraits of notable figures, made plates for articles on fashion and drew cartoon strips. He was noted for his rebuses – or visual puzzles – that offered small cash prizes to readers who could solve them. These were developed by publishers to elicit data from readers indirectly and were an early form of market research. Examples of all kinds of Sloan’s illustration are reproduced here. Luckily, Sloan’s scrapbooks were donated by his widow to Delaware Art Museum, thus preserving the fragile cuttings. Recent drives to microfiche and digitize newspaper archives have led to the neglect, dispersal and wholesale destruction of newspaper archives, which is a huge historical loss. (See Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold (2001) for details of this trend.)

When the transition to photography put Sloan and many of his colleagues out of salaried employment (in 1904 in Sloan’s case), he moved to New York to become a painter and printmaker, following the path of a number of artist colleagues. Luckily, Sloan’s skills as a puzzle designer were still in demand from editors. Puzzles (along with cartoons) were the two genres where illustrators could still practise profitably. In Sloan’s early New York years he had little income from fine art, so for almost a decade puzzle work for Philadelphia journals had supported him. In later years, he earned a living from teaching and achieved success as a member of the group of independent painters called ‘the Eight’. Although by the time of his death, Sloan’s approach to art had been superseded, he was respected as a stalwart of social realism and left a lasting legacy as a teacher.

Sloan was considered a core member of the Ashcan School, which included George Bellows and Robert Henri. These painters had a strong social slant to their art and often depicted the plight of the working class. There was an obvious crossover between satirical cartoons and social realism in fine art, especially for Sloan, who worked in both areas. Sloan was wary of making painted caricatures but his social conscience often led him from social observation into social commentary and – at times – into outright polemical territory. While Sloan’s overtly political imagery worked effectively in his post-1904 cartoons and magazine covers, it translated less well into painting. Sloan’s socialist convictions led him to stand for political office a number of times.

Lobel believes that the visual wit and ingenuity of Sloan’s puzzles informs the subsequent paintings: It is only through a close and sustained examination of Sloan’s illustrations, and a reconsideration of them in dialogue with his other images, that the full scope of his project can be understood and used to illuminate the broader interchange between art and mass culture.

Lobel analyses several paintings in depth. Hairdresser’s Window (1907) is an early example of Sloan’s painting, in which the artist uses the sort of wordplay and visual puns and paradoxes that he had become adept at handling in his newspaper puzzles. In a New York street, pedestrians gawk as a female hairdresser bleaches a customer’s hair in the window of her establishment. It is a scene based on observation but one that has been loaded with visual paradoxes, where poster figures seem almost as real as passers-by and sign lettering seems to lie flat on the picture surface rather than blending into the shallow picture space. The hairdresser is close in appearance to Sloan’s self-portraits.   

Lobel examines Sloan’s treatment of the mass media (including the new phenomenon of cinematic pictures) in his art, the figure of the painter in Sloan’s cartoons, Sloan and the Art Nouveau poster, Sloan’s depiction of family and friends, the portrayal of politics and politicians, Sloan and the Armory Show art (including that of Marcel Duchamp,  whose Nude Descending a Staircase shocked attenders at the 1913 Armory Show). Copious endnotes allow readers to follow up sources. This is a title which will be of use to students of American art, social realism and the area where fine art and commercial illustration overlap, as well being accessible to the general reader.

John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration  by Michael Lobel is published by Yale University Press, 2014. 240pp., 125 mono & 25 colour illus, $50.00. ISBN 978 0 300 19555 2