John Sloan (American, 1871–1951), Nude, Winter, 1944. Oil on Masonite, 24 × 30 in. (60.96 × 76.2 cm). Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Juel Stryker in honor of her parents, Clinton E. and Sarah H. Stryker. M1989.33. Photo: Cleber Bonato. © 2024 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Influenced by George Bellows and Robert Henri, John Sloan was experimenting with nudes across media by the 1920s, as the example here demonstrates. In Nude, Winter, he began exploring more intently color relationships based on the artist Hardesty G. Maratta’s system, which identified 12 colors corresponding with the chromatic scale of 12 half notes in music. Maratta (1864–1924), who debuted his theory in 1909, encouraged artists to organize their palettes based on chords of color, thus creating harmonious pigments, as he once stated, “with the exactness as a musician on a piano.”
Despite Sloan’s strong emphasis on this figure’s physical characteristics, she possesses an otherworldly quality. As Sloan himself explained
in his handbook Gist of Art (1939), “I don’t like a nude that looks too much like human flesh.”
Exhibition label, The Ashcan School and The Eight: “Creating a National Art,” Bradley Family Galleries, September 23, 2022–February 19, 2023. Written by Brandon Ruud, Abert Family Curator of American Art.