William Glackens is a significant figure who links our present with the past. This finely drawn nude with strong acidic yellow background color may be used to strengthen the premise.
Glackens began his artistic life in Philadelphia, America’s first center of Academic training. Long before significant art making moved to New York, Philadelphia artists were opening doors, shocking the public and breaking society’s puritanic rules. In 1809 sculptor William Rush created a loosely draped statue for Fairmount Park’s waterworks Water Nymph and Bittern using a young girl posing in the nude. The event was even more shocking when it was revealed that the model was the daughter of a leading family of Philadelphia Society. Next up was Thomas Eakins perhaps the leading American painter of the 19th century and a highly respected teacher at the Pennsylavania Academy of Fine Arts. As early as 1875 he insisted that his students learn drawing and anatomy from the nude model. This coupled with his photographic studies of naked students cavorting in a country pond (see The Swimming Hole) caused the powers that be to request Eakin’s resignation as chief instructor at the Academy in 1886.
Robert Henri succeeded Eakins as teacher and Glackens began his studies at the Academy under his instruction. They became fast friends from that time on. Because America’s first capitol was also its publishing hub it became the place for young artists skilled in illustration to depict the events of the day. In this environment Glackens joined friends and classmates John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn and Henri. Together they worked as newspaper artists.
Because passage to Europe was cheap they began traveling to that continent’s leading capitols on a frequent basis. They encountered art of the Old Masters, Spanish Realists and in France the artistic liberation newly dubbed “Impressionism”. For Glackens color would never be the same.
In 1895 together and singly they migrated to New York and embraced the new democratic spirit of the city. They were joined by Maurice Pendergast, Ernest Lawson and Arthur B. Davies in depicting the joy and beauty of New York’s immigrant neighborhoods, nightlife and newly opened public beaches. In city parks the rich freely mingled with everyone else and William Gackens created vibrant canvases that celebrated this populist ideal.
Gallerist William Macbeth solidified the group when he presented them as a loosely unified force he called “The Eight”. Critics derisively called them the “Ashcan School” and the epithet stuck for all times. Glackens went on to paint hundreds of scenes of city life, interiors, still lives, figure paintings and portraits. Always present was the artist’s skilled handling of the figure.
Leslie Katz writes in her catalogue essay for William Glackens in Retrospect (1966) that “the artist was a draftsman who sought to communicate.”
In this sense William Glackens who first trained in the cast halls of the 19th century academy brought painting and the celebration of everyday life to the masses. In the Twenty First Century his art endures and is more widely revered than ever. –JC