John Sloan: Painter and Rebel

In 1904, realist painter John Sloan (1871-1951) left a snug life in Pennsylvania for New York City, where he became a chronicler of the urban scene and a founder of the Ashcan school. This biography, as dynamic and colorful as a Sloan canvas, gives us a many-sided man-the youthful art nouveau-style documenter of the leisure class, the hustling Philadelphia newspaper illustrator (1892-1902), the Socialist Party member and editor of the Masses, the truculent eternal outsider who tired of the Ashcan label and moved on to post-Impressionist landscapes, New Mexican paintings and still-never-exhibited erotic art. Sloan met his first wife, Anna ``Dolly'' Wall, in a brothel. Her recurrent breakdowns and sexual encounters with strangers to pay for her alcoholic binges strained their marriage, yet they found common ground in radical causes, mingling with Max Eastman, John Reed, Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge. By charting the disparate styles and personalities of Sloan's Ashcan circle, Loughery, art editor for the Hudson Review, provides a wonderfully astute, intimate portrait of a generation of American realists battling the onslaught of modernism. Photos. (June)