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Looking West, Santa Fe~1923~oil on canvas~18 x 22 inches~A native of Pennsylvania, John Sloan made his home in New York but also lived in Santa Fe every summer for some thirty years, from 1920 to 1950. As a teen, he worked for a dealer in old-master prints and hand copied as many as he could to train himself to be an artist. His first formal art lessons came at Spring Garden Institute in Philadelphia; then he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under Robert Henri and Thomas Anschutz.Sloan worked at the Philadelphia Press with fellow artist/reporters William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn. Before photography became common, they made on-the-spot sketches of news events. Sloan began working for a New York newspaper in 1898, and by 1904 his three Philadelphia buddies were all in New York, with Henri, and continued painting under his tutelage. Despite his reputation as an artist/teacher, in 1907 Henri's entry was snubbed by the National Academy of Design due to his more spontaneous method of painting. He established a new artists' group called "The Eight," espousing the reality of commonplace urban subjects and an artist's right to paint however and whatever he wanted, thus eschewing the in-formal academic system in America, as the Impressionists shunned the more formal academic system in Europe more than thirty years earlier. Thus Sloan and the others were rebels of sorts, and their views became all the more apparent after the ground-breaking 1913 Armory Show.Robert Henri was responsible for John Sloan's coming to Santa Fe. He spoke to both Sloan and Randall Davey about the area's intense sunlight and native culture and architecture. Henri had spent the summer's of 1916-1917 in Santa Fe; the artists were intrigued by his enthusiastic account, and they drove to Santa Fe with their wives in 1919. Unlike some artists who came to New Mexico, Sloan chose not to paint what he called "costume pictures" believing that romanticized interpretations of another culture were demeaning. Sloan's respect for the native Indian and Hispanic cultures of the region was further evident in his role as President of the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts in the early 1930s, as well as his efforts to include work by Indian artists in the exhibitions of the Society of Independent Artists.Although Sloan was well know for his paintings of Indian rituals and Santa Fe genre scenes, it was in his landscapes of the Southwest that made the evolution of his mature painting style most evident. Since his viewing of the breakthrough American and European modernist paintings of the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, Sloan's thinking about landscape had been along the connecting of space through visually receding planar surfaces as seen in Looking West, [toward] Santa Fe, as viewed from Cerro Gordo Road. With the sensibilities of a Cubist, Sloan believed that space must be constructed as well as painted and represented in terms of overlapping surface planes with both linear and color recession schemes. The result is an energetic surface, representative of both the physical location and Sloan's interest in the plastic qualities of nature.In his 1939 teaching book entitled the Gist of Art, Sloan described this idea, "I like to paint the landscape of the Southwest because of the fine geometrical formations and the handsome color. Study of the desert forms, so severe and clear in that atmosphere, helped me to work out the principles of plastic design, the low relief concept... Because the air is so clear you feel the reality of things in the distance."~SLR~signed lower right: John Sloan