Figural
JOHN SLOAN (1871–1951)
Blonde Seated on Edge of Couch, 1913
Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in.
Signed (at lower left): John Sloan
RECORDED: Rowland Elzea, John Sloan’s Oil Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), no. 214 p. 125 illus.
EX COLL: the artist; to his estate, 1951–2002; to [Kraushaar Galleries, New York, 2002]; to private collection, 2002 until the present
From the outset of his career, women figured prominently in Sloan’s iconography, appearing in his prints and paintings as unidealized types going about their day-to-day activities in the city. His first sustained period of involvement with the female nude emerged much later––specifically, in May of 1912, when, having worked from a cramped and chilly corner of his apartment at 155 East 22nd Street, he acquired a studio loft in the “triangle building” at 35 Sixth Avenue at West Fourth Street. Located on the eleventh floor, his new space had eight windows looking to the northwest, a vantage point that provided him with pleasing light as well as fine panoramas of the neighborhood. Liberated from the distractions of family life, Sloan had the opportunity to paint without interruption. Most importantly, the fact that he now had a spacious studio meant that he could bring in a sofa, chair, and other props and work directly from the unclothed figure.
Sloan had strong opinions about the nude––a traditional subject in the history of art that was typically explored by academic painters in relation to narrative themes from mythology and history. However, Sloan approached the motif on his own terms. Rather than seeking to portray the beauty of flesh or convey a sense of eroticism (he viewed the nudes of Bouguereau, for example, as tasteless pictures painted for the “boudoir trade”), Sloan found the female form to be an ideal means of investigating his growing concern for the rudiments of painting. To be sure, the nudes that Sloan produced during 1912 and 1913 played a vital role in his artistic development, especially in relation to his interest in the innovative chromatic strategies advocated by Hardesty Maratta. Such is the case with Blonde Seated on Edge of Couch, one of eight figure studies Sloan painted in 1913 in which he explored color relationships. Other works in this series include Rosette [1913; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine].) As he related in his “Notes:”
[T]he study of color was a major concern for many years and anyone who thinks my pictures are painted with imitative color is sadly mistaken. No two are painted with the same palette…. I was experimenting with different chords and striving to get certain qualities; for instance, around 1913 I painted a series of cool delicate portraits and figures with special interest in blue-violets and rose notes.
Consistent with his desire to use the nude as a means of exploring formalism, Sloan paid little attention to his subject’s looks or age. Some of his models were pretty, others plain, some were thin, others stout and full-bodied, and at least one, named Jennie Doyle, developed a crush on him. The sitter in the the present canvas, which features a young woman seated on a divan as she calmly looks out at the viewer, is likely “Miss Polak,” whose name appears in several of Sloan’s diary entries from January 1913, including a notation from January 14 in which he referred to her as a “very interesting” eighteen year old––an aspiring writer who “knows the world pretty well but is ingenuous at [the] same time." However, although Sloan was always respectful of and interested in his models, creating a portrait or revealing the character or inner spirit of Miss Polak was not his objective. Instead, color and form took precedence over the person, evident here in the way in which the lucious “blue-violets and rose notes” in the broadly-brushed background serve to emphasize the sculptural solidity of the carefully rendered figure, interpreted with an array of golds, yellows, pale pinks, soft flesh tones, and areas of pure white. What Sloan has created is not a just a figure painting but a striking color abstraction revolving around light, shadow, and positive and negative space.
The “paint-soaked” nudes Sloan created during 1912 and 1913 represented a fresh departure from his dark-hued, multi-figured genre scenes of New York. That he was pleased with this particular example is evidenced by the fact that Sloan submitted Blonde Seated at Edge of Couch to the jury of selection for the Carnegie Institute’s Seventeenth Annual Exhibition in 1913, titling the work––in accordance with his new experiments with color––as Golden Girl and Blue. It was undoubtedly the risqué nature of the image that led the conservative-minded selection committee to reject it in favor of the less-controversial McSorley’s Back Room (1912; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire).
