William James Glackens

William James Glackens (1870-1938)

William James Glackens (March 13, 1870 – May 22, 1938) was an American realist painter and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of American art. He is also known for his work in helping Albert C. Barnes to acquire the European paintings that form the nucleus of the famed Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. His dark-hued, vibrantly painted street scenes and depictions of daily life in pre-WW I New York and Paris first established his reputation as a major artist. His later work was brighter in tone and showed the strong influence of Renoir. During much of his career as a painter, Glackens also worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and New York City.

Glackens was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where his family had lived for many generations. William had two siblings: an older sister, Ada, and an older brother, cartoonist and illustrator Louis Glackens. He graduated from the prestigious Central High School in 1890. Throughout his school years, he showed a great interest in and aptitude for drawing and drafting.

After graduation, Glackens became an artist-reporter for The Philadelphia Record. In 1892, he left that newspaper and began illustrating for the Philadelphia Press. He enrolled in evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, studying under the renowned realist Thomas Anshutz. Glackens was not a steady pupil, as art critic Forbes Watson would observe in 1923: "So much impression did the various instructors make upon him that today he can hardly remember who taught there when he was a pupil." 

Upon settling in New York in 1896, Glackens began work as an artist for the New York World, a position he attained through his friend and fellow illustrator George Luks, a painter who had also been a participant in the Henri studio sessions in Philadelphia. Glackens later became a sketch artist for the New York Herald. He also worked as an illustrator for various magazines, including McClure's Magazine, which sent him to Cuba to cover the Spanish–American War. At this time, Glackens was making a living as a magazine illustrator, but his real passion lay in painting. In 1901, he exhibited at the Allen Gallery with Henri and Sloan and thereafter gained favorable notice as an up-and-coming artist. In  1904, Glackens married Edith Dimock, the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut family. She was also an artist, and they lived together in a Greenwich Village townhouse, where they raised two children, Lenna and Ira. If many of their artist friends lived a bohemian life by the standards of the day, such was not the case with William and Edith Glackens. In 1957, Ira Glackens published an anecdotal book about his father and the role he played in the emerging realist movement in art.

In 1906 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1933.

By 1910, Glackens began to concentrate on a "highly personal coloristic style" which represented a break from the Ashcan approach to art. It was, his biographer William Gerdts wrote, "his conversion to mainstream Impressionism." His work was often compared to that of Renoir, to the point that he was called "the American Renoir." Glackens' response to this criticism was always the same: "Can you think of a better man to follow than Renoir?" In aesthetic terms, Glackens' link to his friends who were a part of the Ashcan movement was always tenuous. Ultimately, Glackens was a "pure" painter for whom the sensuousness of the art form was paramount, not a social chronicler or an artist with a bent for politics or provocation.

In 1916, Glackens served as the president of the newly founded Society of Independent Artists, whose mission was to provide broader exhibition opportunities for lesser-known artists. He continued to travel to France between 1925 and 1935 to study the work of the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists. His paintings received gold medals from annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1933 and again in 1936. In contrast to many of his friends among The Eight, such as Sloan and Luks, whose personal lives were turbulent and whose finances were uncertain, Glackens enjoyed a happy marriage, a contented home life, and a steady career, though by the 1930s he was seen by a younger generation interested in abstraction, surrealism, and political art as an old-fashioned artist. 

Glackens died suddenly while vacationing in Westport, Connecticut on May 22, 1938. His posthumous retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art several months later, also shown at the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh, was well received. His legacy is linked to that of the Ashcan school and The Eight. Although he distanced himself from some of their ideals, William Glackens continued to be considered an integral part of the realist movement in American art.

Glackens' subject matter and style changed throughout his life. Influenced by the work he saw during his time in Europe, from Hals and Manet to Frank Duveneck and the Impressionists, Glackens’ early work uses dark, dramatic colors and slashing, overlapping brushstrokes. He depicted scenes of urban life in Paris and its suburbs and painted the theaters and parks of Manhattan. He continued this style and subject matter for some time until he began to break away from The Eight. At that point, his most common subject matter was landscapes, especially beach scenes. Later Glackens became best known for his portraits, and late in his life he focused on still lifes. Despite the changing subject matter, Glackens’ work was clearly the product of a man who loved the fluid, unrestrained quality of oil on canvas. Forbes Watson asserted that Glackens focused on strong color effects, above all else, because "the color of the world makes him thoroughly happy and to express that happiness in color has become his first and most natural impulse." His paintings are, paradoxically, "haunted by the spectre of happiness, obsessed with the contemplation of joy." In many ways, he was always the gentlest, least radical of the Ashcan artists.

Glackens is sometimes criticized for his similarity to Renoir. He was branded an imitator. The charge was made that during the 1920s and 1930s “his once vigorous artistic personality had been blunted by too close an imitation of Renoir’s late style.” Glackens himself seems not to have been affected by any doubts about his own purpose and originality. His art did not reflect the social crises of the day, such as the Great Depression; rather, it offered a refuge from that darkness.