William Glackens is one of those artists from the tumultuous, early 20th century American art movement that time and history have pushed to the margins. While likely underserved, his work—appearing to back away from the radicalism of his day, in favor of stark color and themes drawn from nature —is being re-evaluated in a new light. Glackens dared to experiment with his paint and compositions and, as such, he did not attract the cadre of devotees as many of his contemporaries. A member of the School of Eight, or Ashcan School, of the nineteen-teens and 20s, Glackens counted as his contemporaries such well-known artists today as, John Marin, Robert Henri, John Sloan and George Luks. xxxxxx

But the stylistic double edge found in Glackens’ work—in the form of his embrace of pure color—is due largely to his exposure to the Impressionist paintings of Manet, Monet and Renoir during a visit to Paris with Henri in 1895-96. But, Glackens work departs from the romantic influences of French country life seen in his European counterparts. There is an edgy restlessness in his interpretation of the American scene. His later works are often more decorative and slightly more decorous than his earlier drawing and painting from his ‘dark’ period. For this reason, Glackens has been pigeonholed as an American impressionist; but his earlier work reveal a more contemplative, and perhaps more interesting side. Family Group (1910-11) has vibrant colors predominating, with figures in repose, seemingly oblivious to any expectation of formality, captured by the artist in this quintessentially American portrait.

His In the Buen Retiro (1906) captures the gritty, frantic energy of the crowd, at once engaged and removed from one another—the artist as observer, rather than participant in the celebration. French urban painters like Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Streets, Rainy Day and Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon figures, with their distant airs might have equally informed and influenced Glackens’ work.

But, this exhibition attempts to answer the question: who is William Glackens? In aesthetic terms, Glackens’ link to his friends who were a part of the Ashcan movement was always tenuous. Ultimately, Glackens was a “pure” painter for whom the sensuousness of the art form was paramount, not a social chronicler or an artist with a bent for politics or provocation. He would soon transition from the darker palette of his earlier years to the brilliant, Fauve-inflected color he would adopt and explore in ensuing decades. He was inspired by the work of his friends Alfred Maurer and Maurice Prendergast, and was fa¬miliar as well with the development of such artists as Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove.

Glackens’s reverence for Renoir is well documented, but his painting is also steeped in a knowledge of Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Matisse, and Bon¬nard, at the very least. (John Russell compared Glackens to Albert Marquet, and Robert Hughes likened him to André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck). But, these attributed parallels in style wear thin, doing little to capture the range and emotion that the artist, himself, brought to his work over several decades.

Right: Girl with Apple (1909-10), oil on canvas, 39 x 56″.

By 1910, Glackens had already begun to concentrate on a “highly personal coloristic style,” representing a break from the Ashcan approach to art. It was, his biographer William Gerdts wrote, “his conversion to mainstream Impressionism.” His work was often compared to that of Renoir, to the point that he was called “the American Renoir.” Glackens’ response to this criticism was always the same: “Can you think of a better man to follow than Renoir?”

And this same sensuousness found in Renoir, also on view at the museum in profusion—combined with Glacken’s own form of bold color and composition—can be found in the 90 major works currently on exhibit at Philadelphia’s newly-located Barnes.

The exhibition spans Glackens’s career from the 1890s through the 1930s, with paintings and works on paper from some of America’s finest private and public collections. At least one important work, Vaudeville Team (c. 1908–1909), London Family Collection, has not been publicly exhibited before and several others have rarely, if ever, been shown. This long-overdue survey introduces Glackens to a new generation of viewers and invites further scholarship on a pivotal figure in the history of American art.

After 1900, Glackens slowly transitioned away from magazine illustration assignments, focusing his career on painting. His work began to appear in several group exhibitions in the New York City area. These early exhibitions were the genesis for the formation of The Eight, as Glackens, Sloan, Luks, Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast shared a concern for painting images of everyday life and common people. The theater was one of Glackens’ favorite subjects and he painted many candid portraits of actors, dancers, and circus performers. In 1905, Glackens painted At Mouquin’s; an image of a man and glassy-eyed woman at bar, often compared with Edgar Degas’ The Absinthe Drinker (1875-76). This has become one of Glackens’ most celebrated paintings, and it now hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Glackens was a boyhood friend of Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951), the Philadelphia-born pharmaceutical entrepreneur, self-made millionaire, art collector, and creator of the Barnes Foundation. They knew each other from Philadelphia’s prestigious Central High School, and when they renewed their friendship in 1911, Glackens guided Barnes toward an appreciation of modern French painting. In early 1912, Barnes wrote to Glackens: “Dear Butts, I want to buy some good modern paintings. Can I see you on Tuesday next in New York to talk about it?” The following month, with $20,000 from Barnes in his pocket, the artist traveled to Paris on a buying trip and returned with 33 works including ones by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Maurice Denis, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Left: Giorgio de Chirico, Portrait of Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1926), Oil on canvas.

Many of these purchases became the cornerstone of Barnes’s fabled collection. The two men remained close for several years, as Barnes became his loyal and most important patron. Barnes found Glackens indispensable, stating in 1915, “The most valuable single educational factor to me has been my frequent association with a life-long friend who combines greatness as an artist with a big man’s mind.”

Born in Philadelphia, Glackens (1870–1938) studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There, and as an artist for the Philadelphia Press, he became friends with Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan, the core of the group that later formed “The Eight” in reaction to the National Academy of Design’s hidebound exhibition policies. The group exhibited together only once, in 1908, creating the opening wedge in the struggle to democratize the process by which artists could show and sell their work.

Right: The Shoppers (1907-08), oil on canvas, 60 x 60″.

The exhibition at the Barnes Foundation reunites under one roof for the first time since 1908 six of the seven works that Glackens exhibited in The Eight’s show. One of the works, Race Track (1908–1909), is on view in the Barnes’s collection gallery (Room 12); the location of the seventh work is unknown. Furthermore, three works from the 1908 exhibition—At Mouquin’s (1905) from the Art Institute of Chicago, The Shoppers (1907-08) from the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, and In the Buen Retiro (1906), from the Ted Slavin Collection—are among a group of seven significant works not shown at the other venues of William Glackens. The remaining works are: Chateau Thierry and its study (1906), from the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA; Shop Girls (1900), from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Bathers at Bellport (1912), opening image, above, from the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Left: Shop Girls (c. 1900), pastel and watercolor on illustration board, 13 x 14″.

After the mid-1910s, Glackens mostly abandoned painting urban scenes. While he remained close friends with Henri and his circle, Glackens began to define his art in a more individualized manner. Over the next two decades, Glackens’ subjects reflected his life, as he painted portraits of his friends and family, scenes of the beach and his summerhouse in New Hampshire, and landscapes from his numerous trips abroad. Between 1925 and 1936, Glackens took eight extensive trips to Europe, staying mostly in France.

As Glackens’ health began to deteriorate he began to paint more still lifes; simple arrangements of fruit and flowers that allowed him to experiment with formal concerns. While taking a trip to visit Prendergast in Westport, Connecticut, Glackens died suddenly in 1938.

Right: The Soda Fountain (1935), oil on canvas, 48 x 36″.

During his life time, Glackens seemed to defy the rules of what it meant to be an artist in the early 20th century. His colorful palette and later-in-life focus on benign subject matter, adopted in the face of decided shifts within the artistic community away from such sanguine interpretations of daily life, only served to marginalize him from his de rigueur counterparts. Friends described him as a ‘happy man’ with a good family life and an artist who saw color as a reflection of his optimistic view of the world. He remained undaunted by criticism throughout most of his later years that he was a Renoir imitator. He continued to paint what he loved about the world around him—even if this meant floral still lifes and domestic family scenes.

Overall, Glacken’s earlier work, during the ‘dark period’ is most compelling. It captures the focused intensity for detail and emotion that accomplished artists build their reputations on. A favorite in the show is Seated Actress with Mirror (1903). It is a study in minimalist composition, where light and shadow are masterfully counterbalanced. The central figure’s blue-hued flesh, the rough brush work in her skirt and window drape and the crudely rendered figures around her all serve to keep the unidentified ‘actress’ as the central motif in the work. Here, the action of paint on canvas becomes the focal point–the pure joy of letting the medium speak for itself.

Similarly, Glackens’s Cape Cod Pier (1908), detail appearing on catalogue cover, below, shows two women in white dresses from the back, walking along a lavender-tinted pier toward a beach depicted in shades of bright orange—a purely Fauvist view of the world. In The Green Car (1910), in a rainy Washington Square Park scene a woman stands on a sidewalk, hailing an approaching trolley, the foreground a mash up of contrasting, cross-hatched colors, applied impasto with an eye toward pure abstraction—Glackens at his best.

Right: The Green Car (1910), oil on canvas, 24 x 32″.

There are a number of good reasons to visit the Barnes exhibition, William Glackens. It is a rare compilation of his work; it focuses on an underestimated artist, and it displays his work in the context of the other paintings in the extensive Barnes collection. But, most importantly, it sheds light on his earlier work as pivotal to understanding our gritty origins as a modern nation. Glackens had an artist’s extraordinary keen-eyed capacity to animate a compelling, multi-faceted human tale–and the character and rhythm of everyday life–through the power of brush, paint and canvas.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Visit The Barnes Foundation at:http://www.barnesfoundation.org/

The catalogue, William Glackens is available at: https://store.barnesfoundation.org/ItemShow.aspx?Dep=BUcbIJ9PULNHGwyyruPV7g==&Cat=rnIQqv9+hRc=&It=igI20udZ3nA53rzFAhCK6w==

William Glackens, by Avis Berman Contributions by Avis Berman, Elizabeth Thompson  Colleary, Heather Campbell Coyle, Judith F. Dolkart, Alicia G. Longwell, Martha Lucy, Patricia Mears, Carol Troyen, and Emily C. Wood

This revelatory new monograph provides a richly illustrated and comprehensive introduction to William Glackens (1870-1938), an early champion of modernist painting in America and one of its most talented exponents.  A founder of the Ashcan School along with painters Robert Henri and John Sloan, Glackens introduced modern art to the United States through his collaboration with the collector Albert C. Barnes and role in the organization of such landmark exhibitions of American and European avant-garde art as the epochal Armory Show of 1913.

Left: Cape Cod Pier (detail), 1908, oil on canvas, 26 x 32″.

William Glackens reveals the artist”s mastery of color and passion for travel, with works painted on the east coast of North America – Cape Cod, Connecticut, Long Island, New Hampshire, and Nova Scotia – and in France and Spain. In this new, long-awaited publication, accompanying the first major exhibition in fifty years of the work of William Glackens, thematic essays by important scholars examine many facets of this artist: his early years in Philadelphia; his relationship with French painting; his social observation and interest in fashion and costume; his work as a draftsman and illustrator; his depictions of women, urban crowds, landscapes, seascapes, and still lifes; and his role as a tastemaker and art advocate.  Also included are a chronology bibliography, exhibition history, and index.