...[P]aintings such as Hairdresser's Window, The Haymarket, and Election Night (all 1907), further demonstrate Sloan's astute powers of observation and his sympathetic understanding of his subjects. Taking a keen interest in the spectacle of the modern city, Sloan depicts people of all ages strolling, shopping, and surveying their surroundings and each other. While some critics found Sloan's lower-class subject matter exciting, others, accustomed to more genteel themes, found it disturbing. Hostile critics charged that his paintings, like others of the "Eight," were "vulgar" and crudely finished and that they lacked the beauty of academic painting. ....
Sloan was the art editor of The Masses, a socialist newspaper, in the second decade of the 20th century, and while he never lost his sense of connection with the working classes, he lost faith in the socialist political agenda. He gained recognition slowly for his paintings, his print-making, his book illustrations and etchings. In 1920 he and his wife bought a winter home in Santa Fe. The article includes this information:
In May 1943 Dolly Sloan died of a heart attack. Barely one year later Sloan married [Helen] Farr, whom he had met at the Art Students League in the 1920s. With his own health restored after three operations to clear his gall duct between 1938 and 1943, he began working with his usual enthusiasm. In 1950 he was awarded a gold medal for painting by American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Some suggest his later work is under-valued by critics. Still his Ashcan era stuff contains images most often associated with American social life, and one of these is "Backyards, Greenwich Village" (1914) --
Speechless.
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