William Glackens

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William James Glackens (1870-1870 – May 22, 1938) was an American realist painter and one of the Ashcan School of American Art's founding members.

He is also known for his efforts in assisting Albert C. Barnes in acquiring the European paintings that make up the foundation of the famed Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia's nucleus.

His dark-hued, vividly painted street scenes, and representations of daily life in pre-WW I New York and Paris first established his reputation as a major artist.

Renoir's later works were brighter in tone and displayed a lot of influence.

Glackens also worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and New York City during a large part of his career as an illustrator.

Early life

Glackens was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where his family had lived for many generations. William had two brothers, Ada, and Louis Glackens, an older brother. In 1890, he graduated from the prestigious Central High School. Throughout his school years, he demonstrated a keen fascination with and a natural aptitude for drawing and drafting. He enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in November 1891.

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Career

Glackens made a name for herself as the Philadelphia Journal's editor-reporter after graduation. He left the paper and began drawing illustrations for the Philadelphia News in 1892. He enrolled in evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, learning under Thomas Anshutz, the renowned realist. Glackens was not a good student," art critic Forbes Watson would say in 1923: "So much pressure did the various instructors make on him that today he can hardly recall who taught them when he was a pupil." John Sloan attended the Academy, and he introduced Glackens to Robert Henri, a vivacious painter and charismatic figure in Philadelphia art circles. Henri held regular artist's gatherings at his house, occasions to socialize, drink, sketch, talk about art, and give artistic critique of one another's work. Henri encouraged the young men to read Whitman and Emerson, William Morris Hunt's On Art and George Moore's Modern Painting, as well as the need to create a strong new American art that spoke to their time and place. These gatherings were the start of what became known as the Ashcan school of American art, a movement that discarded nineteenth-century academic art's formality and gentility and instead aimed to middle-class and middle-class metropolitan life for its content.

Glackens, together with several fellow artists, including Henri, travelled to Europe in 1895 to paint and immerse himself in European art. He first visited Holland, where he studied the Dutch masters. He then moved to Paris, where he rented a studio for a year with Henri and enjoyed his first exposure to the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. (Manet became an idol for both boys). Those artists and art enthusiasts with a deeper understanding of the Old Masters and the contemporary art movements were on the lookout for artists of the time who wanted to establish themselves in an American art world. Glackens painted independently in Paris, but did not attend any classes. Glackens, a confirmed Francophile, resurfaced regularly to paint in Paris and France's south.

Glackens began working as an artist for the New York World in 1896, a painter who had also been a participant in the Henri studio sessions in Philadelphia. Glackens later became a sketch artist for the New York Herald. He also worked as an illustrator for several magazines, including McClure's Magazine, which sent him to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War. Glackens was making a living off of a magazine illustrator at the time, but his true passion was in painting. Henri and Sloan displayed at the Allen Gallery in 1901, and after that gained acclaim as an up-and-coming artist.

Edith Dimock, the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut family, was born in 1904. She was also an artist, and she and Lenna and Ira lived in a Greenwich Village townhouse, where they raised two children. If many of their artist friends lived a bohemian life by the time, that was not the case with William and Edith Glackens. Ira Glackens' 1957 anecdotal book about his father and the role he played in the emerging realist movement in art.

He was accepted as an Associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1906 and became a full Academician in 1933.

Glackens became a member of The Eight, five of whom (Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, as well as Glackens) are considered Ashcan realists in New York. Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast were among the other participants in this tight alliance. The artists' cause had nothing to do with stylistic similarity or anything to do with art politics, according to the group's first exhibition in 1908. After being rejected repeatedly from the "official" exhibitions at the influential, conservative National Academy of Design, these eight men had to hold separate exhibits. Their breakaway venture was, in part, a way of protesting the control body's rigid interpretation of artistic quality. The Macbeth Gallery's exhibition, which was on display in a small-scale "succès de scandale" and toured several cities from Newark to Chicago in a traveling exhibition curated by Sloan, was a small-scale "succès de scandale." The painters' fame and were invited to exhibit at numerous museums. They had triggered a national dialogue about acceptable art and the need to remove the constraints of American culture's Genteel Tradition. In 1910, the bulk of the Eight members of the "Exhibition of Independent Artists" began, a new attempt to shake the Academy's exclusivity.

Glackens, Henri, Sloan, Luks, and Shinn were key figures in the modernist movement in the visual arts during the years (c. 1895-2004) when criticizing writers of realist fiction, such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, were gaining more attention and trying to abandon the Genteel Tradition in American letters. The painters portrayed vibrant, often inelegant urban themes, as well as the acceptance of artistic freedom. They were not concerned with modernist techniques; their primary interest was on energy painting and a new, easily accessible topic. Glackens was an integral part of the company. In his paintings, including drawings like Hammerstein's Roof Garden (1901), Tugboat and Lighter (1904), and Winter, Central Park (1905), the stylistic aspects of Ashcan art are evident in his period art.

In his autobiography artist Jerome Myers of Glackens, "The studio home of William Glackens on Ninth Street just off Fifth Avenue, part of the charm of this fine period." During the season, it was a joy for my wife and me to attend the Glackens[es] at-homes. Friends will gather in congenial memory of William Glackens' masterpieces: Edith Glackens, always an amusing hostess, and William Glackens' reminiscing with his companions. The young Glackens[es], Lenna and Ira, were photographed together with their young artist friends, as well as older friends who had known them since childhood. "Evereett Shinn and Guy Pène du Bois were two of the latter, and the whole scene was imbued with the energy of a New York that is now deceased."

Glackens began to concentrate on a "highly personal coloristic style" which represented a departure from the Ashcan's view of art by 1910. "His conversion to mainstream Impressionism," William Gerdts, his biographer, wrote. His work was often compared to Renoir's, to the point that he was dubbed "the American Renoir." Glackens' reaction to this criticism was always the same: "Can you imagine a better man to follow than Renoir?" Glackens' connection to his fellows who were a member of the Ashcan movement was always tenuous, particularly in aesthetic terms. Glackens was, in the end, a "pure" painter for whom the art form's sensuousness was paramount, not a social chronicler or an artist with a penchant for politics or provocation.

Albert C. Barnes, a Central High School classmate and a friend, began to investigate and collect modern art at this time. On a trip to Paris, Glackens ordered him to buy him some "advanced" artwork. Glackens returned from Paris with about twenty paintings, including works by Cézanne, Renoir, Manet, and Matisse, formed the basis of the Barnes Foundation Collection. Barnes was also advised by Glackens on later art shifts and purchases. Glackens, one of New York artists, was known for his sophisticated eye and broad, cosmopolitan tastes. Interestingly, he was less concerned by the 1913 Armory Exhibition's European modernism than any of his Ashcan colleagues who thought the exhibition was a threat to American realist art.

Glackens was president of the newly founded Society of Independent Artists in 1916, whose aim was to provide more exhibition opportunities for less well-known artists. Between 1925 and 1935, he travelled to France to study the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists' work. In 1933 and again in 1936, his paintings received gold medals from annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Glackens enjoyed a happy marriage, a happy home life, and a stable career as an old-fashioned artist in comparison to many of his peers in The Eight, such as Sloan and Luks, whose personal lives were turbulent and whose finances were uncertain, but in comparison to others in the 1980s, he was seen as an old-fashioned artist.

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