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Prostitutes in the Art of John Sloan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Suzanne L. Kinser
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Extract

It came as no surprise to John Sloan when in 1910 the National Academy of Design refused to exhibit his painting 3 a.m. (Fig. 1). Its subject matter must have appeared to the academy jury, as Sloan later said, rather “like a pair of men's drawers slipped into an old maid's laundry.” It is apparent that the critics of the day, who deemed the work “too frank and vulgar,” could hardly have overlooked the fact that the seated woman, sipping a cup of tea, is a prostitute. Indeed, the other woman, who is busily engaged in cooking her a meal, would appear to be one also. During the Progressive Era, it was common for prostitutes to share tenement flats like the one in 3 a.m., as numerous muckraking newspaper articles and tracts on the social evil were beginning to make plain. The reformist zeal for which the period is presently noted may have succeeded in closing down a number of brothels; but the world's “oldest profession” continued to flourish, as journalists were constantly reminding an apprehensive but nevertheless titillated American public. In 1910 prostitutes were more visible than ever. Operating independently out of tenements like the one in 3 a.m., they worked on the streets and out of dance halls, saloons, and cheap restaurants.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 9 , October 1984 , pp. 231 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

NOTES

1. Sloan, John, John Sloan's New York Scene: From the Diaries, Notes and Correspondence, 1906–1913, ed. John, Bruce St. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 396.Google Scholar

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3. Ibid., p. 20.

4. See Hills, Patricia, “John Sloan's Images of Working-Class Women: A Case Study of the Roles and Interrelationships of Politics, Personality, and Patrons in the Development of Sloan's Art, 1905–16,” in Prospects #5 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1980), 157–96.Google Scholar

5. Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie: An Authoritative Text Background and Sources Criticism, ed. Pizer, Donald (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), p. 1.Google Scholar

6. Letter in Survey, 05 1913, p. 311.Google Scholar

7. See Walkowitz, Judith, “The Politics of Prostitution” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1980), 123, 135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. See Connelly, Mark, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980).Google Scholar

9. Morris, Lloyd, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 220.Google Scholar

10. Van Wyck Brooks, , John Sloan: A Painter's Life (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1955), p. 58.Google Scholar

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12. Ibid., p. 400.

13. Ibid., p. 439.

14. Ibid., p. 110.

15. Ibid., p. 313.

16. Wilson, Richard Guy, “The Great Civilization,” The American Renaissance, 1876–1917 (New York: Pantheon, 1979), p. 29.Google Scholar

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20. Connelly, Mark, in The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era, p. 11Google Scholar, points out that Walter Lippman, in his 1913 Preface to Politics, was greatly concerned with the discontinuity between culture and experience. According to Lippman, culture was “routine, taboo creeds, idols or ideals – the mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories and personal wishes forced upon the realities of social life or experience.” Culture was, in other words, the burden of civilized morality. Experience, conversely, was the new, complex, and continually changing urban industrial civilization of the early twentieth century. One could not impose outmoded cultural forms on radically new social conditions.

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22. In Song of Myself, Whitman includes the prostitute among a variety of American types; the factory girl, the paving man, the peddler, etc. Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1926), p. 37Google Scholar. He also wrote a poem entitled “To a Common Prostitute,” p. 323.Google Scholar

23. In Art Digest (10 1932), p. 29Google Scholar, Sloan speaks of Manet as “the god of my youth.”

24. Henri, , Art Spirit, p. 209.Google Scholar

25. Sloan never visited Europe, and until the Armory Show in 1913, he did not seem fully aware of what was truly avant garde in contemporary European art.

26. Editorial in The Masses, New York, 01 1913.Google Scholar

27. This was the period when some began to suggest that the prostitute's customer should also be arrested. See Worthington, George, Specialized Courts Dealing with Sex Delinquency (New York: Frederick H. Hitchcock, 1921), pp. 302–4Google Scholar, for a discussion of this.

28. Untermeyer, Louis, “Cell Mates,” The Masses, 05 1913, p. 4.Google Scholar

29. Fitzgerald, Richard, who has made a study of Sloan's illustrations for The Masses, comments in Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973)Google Scholar, that the women in Haymarket are prostitutes. Significantly, Lloyd Morris, social historian, uses Sloan's Haymarket to illustrate his discussion of prostitution in New York around the turn of the century in Incredible New York, p. 215.Google Scholar

30. Sloan, , Scene, p. 152.Google Scholar

31. Kofed, Jack, Night Clubs, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931).Google Scholar

32. Connelly, in Response to Prostitution, states: “It was hard for anyone, even the most naive visitor from some provincial hamlet to miss them. They were known to all of those who cared to know and those who did not, certain streets and certain blocks in certain parts of town” (p. 3).

33. Rosen, Ruth, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution During the Progressive Era (Ph.D. diss., Unversity of California, Berkeley,), p. 312Google Scholar. Also note that in Dreiser's 1900 novel, Sister Carrie, the heroine's fall was due to her desire for pretty clothing.

34. Sloan, , Scene, p. 292.Google Scholar

35. Report of the Massachusetts Commission for the Investigation of White Slavery So-Called 1914, pp. 15, 16.Google Scholar

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37. A statement by sociologist David Matza, quoted in Rosen, , Lost Sisterhood, p. 13.Google Scholar

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41. Ibid., p. 309.

42. Rosen, , Lost Sisterhood, p. 54.Google Scholar

43. In a May 1913 cartoon for The Masses, Art Young uses a long-feathered hat beside a river bank as his symbol for a prostitute who is a suicide by drowning. And in an August 1915 issue of The Masses, a poem, “Lies,” an accompaniment to a George Bellows illustration of prostitutes, refers to the fact that prostitutes are noted for their feathered hats.

44. Both quotations are from Sloan's diary. The first appears on p. 396, the second on p. 391.

45. Perlman, Bernard, The Immortal 8: American Painting from Eakins to the Armory Show, 1870–1913 (Westport, Conn.: North Lights Press, 1974).Google Scholar

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49. Hills, , on p. 174Google Scholar, speaks of the significance of the open door as an indication of freedom of movement.

50. Rosen, , Lost Sisterhood, p. 262.Google Scholar

51. Hills, , “Sloan's Images,” p. 176.Google Scholar

52. Sloan, John, New York Etchings, ed. Sloan, Helen Fair (New York: Dover, 1978)Google Scholar, plate 15.

53. Sloan, as quoted by Coleman, David Elliot in “The Social Commentary of John Sloan 1900–1916 in the Context of American Progressivism” (master's thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1972), p. 65.Google Scholar

54. Goldman, Emma, The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism (1917; rpt. New York: Times Change Press, 1970), p. 20.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., p. 25.

56. Veblen, , Leisure Class, p. 37.Google Scholar

57. Sloan, , Scene, p. 305.Google Scholar