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Glackens folder
M.F. Roberts papers

Dec 14, 1938

THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDN

ART OF GLACKENS PUT ON EXHIBITION

Memorial Display of Drawings and 92 Oils Offered at the Whitney Museum

WON GRAND PRIX IN 1937

Later Paintings Reveal Rare Individualism in Artist Long a Renoir Disciple

By EDWARD ALDEN JEWELL

A memorial exhibition of the work of William J. Glackens, distinguished American artist, opened with a preview yesterdday afternoon at the Whitney Museum, 10 West Eighth Street. It opens to the public toady and will continue through Jan. 15.

Ninety-two oils and more than thirty drawings make up this beautifully representative survey, which traces the artist's development from about 1895, when he painted the dark and somewhat satiric "Bal Bullier," to shortly before his death last Spring. Mr. Glackens was born in 1870 in Philadelphia, where he began his art career as a newspaper illustrator. It was while engaged in this work, the catalogue tells us, that Glackens met three artists, similarly engaged at the time, with whom he was to be closely associated: George Luks, John Sloan and Everett Shinn.

Later on, in 1908, Glackens and these three painters helped form the famous little group known as The Eight, its other members being Maurice Prendergast, Arthur H. Davies, Ernest Lawson and Robert Henri. They stood out strongly as individualists and as "realists" bent on finding their material in the daily life of the actual world in which they lived. They were avowed enemies of such facile prettification as was then rampant in the art world. And yet the term individualist proved, for all of them, the more abiding. Though they had much in common, each went his own way.

[[image]]
Peter A. Juley & Son
IN WILLIAM J. GLACKENS MEMORIAL EXHIBITION
"Child in Chinese Costume," which is on display at Whitney Museum

Artist Goes to Paris

William Glackens's own way had led him, long ere the period of The Eight to France - to Paris, of course - where, in 1895, he worked independently and got a picture accepted for the Salon. "He was also," the catalogue relates, "an exhibitor in the Paris Exposition of 1900, where, at the close of his life, in the Exposition of 1937, he was to receive the highest award accorded an American artist, the Grand Prix."

When Glackens returned to America in 1896 he settled in New York, resuming his work as illustrator. His illustrations appeared in The New York Herald, The New York World and in various  magazines.

Like Sloan, like Henri, like Luks and other friends, Glackens was always deeply interested in liberal movements in art. He headed the committee for selection of American exhibitors in the Armory Show of [[illegible]]. He had taken part 1916 first Independent Exhibition and when the Society of [[?]] Artists was organized, Glackens served, in 1916 and 1917, as its first president - a post that has been occupied ever since by John Sloan.

From 1925 Glackens spent a great deal of time in France, where many of the canvases included in his memorial exhibition were painted. The French school influenced him in a general way, though this fact would never have been so apparent had it not been for the manifest discipleship to Renoir, which endured all through the middle years of Glackens's career. Along toward the last he was able in much more telling degree to assimilate what had been so enthusiastically acquired. There are glowing later canvases, such as "Lenna and Imp", 1930, and "The Soda Fountain" of 1935, that may be called almost pure Glackens; that represent the fine and integrated development of a talent sunny and sensitive and, always in its sensitive way, robust.

Committee Selects Works

The memorial exhibition, for which Guy Pene duBois, Leon Kroll and Eugene Speicher constituted an advisory committee on selection, illuminates the whole vista of change and growth, of thralldom and the ultimate triumph of personal feeling vividly expressed in an individual manner.

The low key of the earliest work belongs to the period. Most of the paintings done soon after the turn of the century have been placed in the first rooms at the museum, to the left of the entrance. Here we find such admirable canvases as "Luxembourg Gardens" (1904), which has been acquired by the Corcoran; "Coasting in Central Park," painted about a year later;