McSorley's Bar, 1912
"John McSorley opened his alehouse on East Seventh Street in 1854 and for half a century served an all-male clientele of tanners, carpenters, bricklayers, butchers, teamsters and brewers. He died in 1910. ... In McSorley’s Bar, Sloan employs 'the charm of chiaroscuro,' as his friend William Butler Yeats described it, to endow the scene with drama and like many of Sloan’s paintings, it celebrates the quotidian pleasures of working-class life. As such, it speaks to Sloan’s political as well as artistic commitments. A lifelong socialist—he was art editor of The Masses magazine from its founding in 1911—Sloan considered his art a contribution to the struggle for a more just society. And yet, ironically, McSorley’s Bar mediated between plebeian Greenwich Village and an upscale world of art galleries and collectors, thus speeding the transformation of McSorley’s from workingman’s saloon to tourist attraction. Leftwing bohemians had discovered McSorley’s in the 1910s. ..."
Painting McSorley’s Bar
my daily art display
Art Out The Wazoo
Wikipedia
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