Metro Pulse/Artbeat/William Glackens

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From Newsprint to Canvas with William Glackens

by Heather Joyner

I'll admit it: I really dislike the paintings of Renoir. As far as I'm concerned, his slapdash approach and vision through rose-tinted spectacles trigger the same effect as eating too much candy—what's at first tempting ends up sticking to my teeth and making me feel a little sick. Yet the art of the Renoir-influenced William Glackens does not provoke in me the same unfortunate response. Perhaps it's because Glackens' keen eye for detail and technical ability are so evident in most of what he produced throughout four decades beginning in the 1890s, or because his brushwork is flamboyant without being gratuitous. Maybe it's his talent for conveying basic human behavior and emotion—no matter how bourgeois the circumstances—without going overboard. People outdoors in nice weather, mothers with children, the excitement of the circus or theater—all are things we essentially relate to. Whereas Renoir idealized the mundane, Glackens celebrated it. The art of both could be called na�ve, but Glackens' "innocence" somehow rings truer.

From Realism to Impressionism: William Glackens' Voyage opens Tuesday at the KMA. and consists of three drawings and 61 expertly culled paintings. Making its second and final appearance before returning to the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale (where it will move into permanent digs), the show is arranged chronologically with works reflecting the path of an accomplished artist as he moved from complex drawings commissioned by magazines to grand and gleaming canvases rivaling those of Manet and Degas. According to Curator Steven Wicks, the exhibit is "by far the most valuable art ever shown at the museum." Remarkably, that means a Glackens image would cost you more than a masterpiece by Rodin and is worth so much that the head of KMA security won't reveal prices to his own crew, let alone the public. The aforementioned oils are thus the color of money, although that's hardly the point. That fortunes are spent to acquire such works matters little to most viewers; whatever fervor drives investment in early 20th century art, the work itself is what counts. And count it does with its wide-ranging style and subject matter.

As part of a group of artists known as "The Eight" (alongside Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Everett Shinn, and Maurice Prendergast), Glackens was initially concerned with depicting "real" people in "real" places—breaking from the romantic bent of artists preceding him. Writes Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts Director Mahonri Sharp Young: "When The Eight closed their famous show at [Manhattan's] Macbeth's in 1908, they thought they had made a revolution, for 'The Black Gang' had triumphed over the Academicians and the Impressionists. It was the victory of Realism, of the gray city streets, with horses steaming and locomotives puffing in the snow, drunks and derelicts and kids broken by life. The critics agreed, either reluctantly or exultantly."

Ironically, as an organizer of and participant in New York's 1913 Armory Show (an event intended to unite European and American artists), Glackens found himself veering away from the kind of painting he and his friends had sought to defend. In one of his few essays, he wrote, "We have not yet arrived at a national art. The old idea that American art, that a national art, is to become a fact by the reproduction of local subjects, though a few still cling to it, has long since been put into the discard. Our own art is arid. It shows that we are afraid to be impulsive, afraid to forget restraint, afraid above everything to appear ridiculous."

It's possible that Glackens could not reconcile the grit of his work-for-hire with the buoyancy of his "higher art." Or maybe the life of a visual journalist (also shared by Shinn, Sloan, and Luks as fellow newspaper artists in Philadelphia, Glackens' birthplace) made being an altogether different kind of artist that much more appealing. After all, work for papers and publications like McClure's magazine (for which Glackens produced countless illustrations) required exhaustive observation and a willingness to put oneself in unpleasant situations—as Glackens did when he crawled through a window at the scene of a murder and landed in a pool of blood. Maybe the dominance of photography as a medium for reporting had begun to loom large.

Before leading "The Eight," Robert Henri inspired the aforementioned newspapermen to move to New York and create fine art. Eventually known as the force behind the "Ashcan School" of New York Realists—so-called because of their unflinching perspective on urban life—Henri repeatedly asserted that it's easier to express than to see. He stated, "You must see it first, and then what you see will be in your work." For Glackens, his evolving expressiveness was strengthened by dedication to that principle. In fact, it's too bad there are not more Glackens drawings in the KMA show, given the degree to which they informed his later work.

Paintings such as 1897's Outside the Guttenberg Race Track (New Jersey), in which grubby behind-the-scene goings-on dominate, form a bridge—however vague—to Glackens' more elegant portraits such as that of his daughter Lenna wearing a Chinese robe. Coming full-circle, in a sense, we're presented with the canvas found on Glackens' easel after his death. Small and forlorn-looking, it features a few tubes of paint and a jar of linseed oil. Quite humbly, it shows substances the artist employed and nothing more. This, despite Glackens' "great voyage," a journey worthy of our attention.