On View
Not on viewObject number1972/3.46
Night Windows
Artist
John Sloan
(American, 1871-1951)
Date1910
Mediumetching
Dimensionsimage: 5 1/4 in. × 7 in. (13.3 × 17.8 cm)
sheet: 9 1/8 × 11 1/2 in. (23.2 × 29.2 cm)
mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm)
sheet: 9 1/8 × 11 1/2 in. (23.2 × 29.2 cm)
mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm)
Credit LineArt Auction Fund
Exhibition HistoryUnknown exhibitions, Battle Creek Civic Center (Oct. 5 - 30, 1975).
"The American Experience: Prints and Drawings, 1900-1946," KIA (dates unknown).
"For and Against Modern Art: The Armory Show + 100," KIA (June 29 - Sept. 29, 2013).
"Lasting Legacy: A Collection for Kalamazoo," Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan (Sep. 6, 2014 - Jan. 4, 2015).
"American Realism: Visions of America 1900-1950," Muskegon Museum of Art (May 11 - August 27, 2023); Flint Institute of Arts (September 9 - December 30, 2023); KIA (January 21 - April 14, 2024).Label TextJohn Sloan is renowned for his representations of the emerging realities of life in New York City in the early twentieth century, a period when the tenements of lower Manhattan teemed with new waves of working-class immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Labeled a part of the “Ashcan School” for his gritty, smudgy representations of the seedier side of life in New York in this era, Sloan distinguished himself from his fellow Ashcans in part through his voyeuristic approach. Many of his paintings and etchings look out across rooftops, gazing into the personal spaces and lives of his neighbors in the crowded apartments of New York, where true privacy was rarely available. A repeated source of interest was the private lives of women, who are at times shown in states of undress. In Night Windows the theme of voyeurism is made explicit by the inclusion of a shadowy male figure sitting alone on the rooftop and staring at a scantily clad woman in a nearby window. Meanwhile, the man’s wife hangs up the washing in the window beneath him. If Sloan’s urban pictures at times seem creepy, they are also both of their time and psychologically challenging - after all, we are looking through the neighbors’ windows too.
Often working as a printmaker, Sloan’s fine art was heavily influenced by the twelve years he spent capturing contemporary life in Philadelphia and New York City while working for newspapers. Night Windows was exhibited at the landmark 1913 Armory Show, the exhibition often attributed with introducing modernism to the broader American art-viewing public, as an example of new developments in the American art scene.
