On View
Not on viewObject number1991/2.23
Skaters
Artist
William James Glackens
(American, 1870-1938)
Dateca. 1910-1930
Mediumgouache on brown paper
Dimensionsimage: 11 3/4 × 17 1/2 in. (29.8 × 44.5 cm)
frame: 18 3/4 × 24 1/4 × 1 in. (47.6 × 61.6 × 2.5 cm)
frame: 18 3/4 × 24 1/4 × 1 in. (47.6 × 61.6 × 2.5 cm)
Credit LineGift of Mrs. Flora Kirsch Beck
Exhibition History"70 Years, 70 Works from the KIA Permanent Collection," KIA (Nov. 19, 1994 - Feb. 10, 1995).
"Two by Twenty: Artists from the KIA Collection," KIA (Sept. 3 - Dec. 5, 1996).
On loan to Muskegon Museum of Art (May 27, 1997 - Aug. 4, 1998).
"Highlights from the Permanent Collection: Prints and Drawings," Sept. 15 - Nov. 25, 2001;
"Artists as Storytellers," KIA Nay Gallery (Feb. 12 - Nov. 10, 2000).
"At Work and Play," KIA Long Gallery (Apr. 1 - July 22, 2005).
"Master Drawings from the Permanent Collection," KIA (Nov. 18, 2006 - Feb. 4, 2007).
"For and Against Modern Art: The Armory Show + 100," DePaul Art Museum (Apr. 4 - June 16, 2013) and the 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 TextWilliam Glackens began his career in Philadelphia as an artist-reporter for the local newspaper before moving to New York City in the 1890s. With his friends John Sloan, Robert Henri, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, Glackens formed a group of painters who sought to break from the powerful but aesthetically conservative National Academy of Design, and who became known as “The Eight” when they exhibited together in 1908. Later, these artists were often lumped together under the (originally derogatory) moniker of the “Ashcan School” due to their humble subjects, smudgy technique, and brown and gray color palettes.
The Ashcan artists are notable for reorienting artistic views of the growing city away from focus on the lives of the Manhattan elite and calm views of picturesque city streets and towards the experiences of the city’s hoi polloi, which included a growing number of impoverished immigrants living in desperate conditions. While earlier chroniclers of the American city had often viewed it with pleasant detachment from their apartment windows, these artists combined oil painting with their journalistic commitments and lent their pictures a sense of immediacy by depicting teeming crowds and squalid tenements from the street level. Rather than represent the rougher side of city life that fascinated many of his friends, Glackens, deeply influenced by the French Impressionists, often instead focused on the suburban middle class at leisure. However, paintings like this one preserve a sense of authenticity by depicting everyday moments from a firsthand perspective.
