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Today John Sloan (1871–1951) would be regarded as a conservative artist. Once he was regarded as a revolutionary, along with Robert Henri, his mentor, and other members of The Eight, later expanded into the Ashcan School. So-called “artist-reporters,” their work was discredited as “vulgar” by academic traditionalists, particularly those affiliated with New York's influential National Academy of Design. Responding to the urban environment, particularly the “low life” in immigrant neighborhoods, their work was too realistic, crudely executed, and emotionally provocative for the establishment, which demanded polished images of polite people. It was a familiar battle, fought many times in the modern era, between the hoi polloi and the upper bourgeoisie, in America between a Whitman-inspired democratic “street art” and the nouveau riche idea of art's “highness,” making it suitable for conspicuous consumption; between a suppressive idea of safe art and the view of art as irrepressible expression informed by personal experience; more generally, between respectable art that obeys long-sanctioned rules and the reckless impropriety of a “lawless” art. Sloan, with his voyeuristic view of backyard events—intimate events in tenement apartments with curtainless windows, making it easy to spy on them with binoculars, as Sloan did—once represented the so-called “shock of the new,” in both style and theme. His once unconventional work was hard to sell, but once it became conventional and did, European modernism caught up with it (by way of the 1913 Armory Show in New York), nullifying its artistic and commercial value and reducing Sloan to a minor artist working in a retardataire, not to say obsolete, manner.
Janice Coco's first-rate book is a convincing attempt to counteract this trivializing view. She shows, with the aid of psychoanalytic ideas—mostly Freudian, with some lip service to Winnicott's idea of “potential space”—that Sloan's art is much more subtle and complex than it ha