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In winter 1912, Albert C. Barnes gave artist William James Glackens $20,000 and a simple instruction: go find him some worthwhile art to start a collection. From the Hotel Lutetia in Paris (which became a home to both Picasso and Matisse at various points), Glackens anxiously wrote to his wife that he wasn’t sure Barnes’s money would go terribly far in the city. He’d already bypassed some Cézannes, blanching at the price. But there was one painting he snatched up immediately. “I got a little Renoir at Durand-Ruel,” Glackens wrote, “A little girl reading a book, just the head and arms, in his best period.” Glackens’s art had begun a process of radical transformation by then (though the Paris trip pushed him even further), the generous inky blacks and white shock of electric illumination that had earned him a spot among The Eight (a little Manet mixed with Ashcan) gradually softening into a painting style both more colorful and gently atmospheric. Scenes of vaudeville acts and late-night cafés gave way to domestic interiors, sumptuous and intimate. When he revealed his 1910/11 painting Family Group at the New York Armory Show in 1913, a portrait of his family in their home at 23 5th Avenue in Manhattan, the shift in his art was evident. “He became a violent impressionist almost overnight,” critic Henry McBride wrote some years later. After that show, some began referring to Glackens as “the American Renoir.” With the birth of two children and an increasing orientation toward family life coming around the same time as the changing tide of his artistic style, it would be easy to argue that a painting like Woman Sewing is the work of a man who had transitioned into a conservative middle class life and grown content with it. Glackens’s earlier portraits of women, especially of his wife Edith Dimock (an artist and suffragist), are alive and complex, filled with women testing the boundaries of new potentials and navigating their changing roles in the public sphere at the turn of the century (see, for example, The Shoppers of 1907/08). Woman Sewing seems to present a different sort of scene, and a different sort of woman. But does it actually? Consider the fluid vigor of the brush strokes. They are curving, fleeting, active, not quite frenetic but lending an unusual pace to a quiet activity, the cloth spilling like a small waterfall out of the sewer’s hands. That Glackens employs a soft focus to both the model and the interior that surrounds her could be a knock against him (equating a woman with the furniture, objectifying her—how original). Yet there is a subtle, significant focal adjustment around her face, where the pace of the brush calms briefly (an important distinction from Renoir: Glackens maintained some of the edges of his illustrator days even as he delved deep into impressionism). This stillness carries the suggestion of a woman who is self-possessed, focused in a world sweeping and shifting around her. The movement in the object she creates, though, implies she might also be a part of the shift. Within the greater body of Glackens’s images of women who are whole, engaged, humorous, and not always (or even often) defined by their relation to men, it becomes harder to read Woman Sewing as an entirely straightforward image. Traditional it may be, but there’s a glimmer of something more. To inquire about this work, visit this page.
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