Label Text:
John Sloan’s New York teems with human activity and desire. The artist identified Night Windows as a scene he witnessed behind Twenty-Third Street: “While his faithful wife is doing wash downstairs, my neighbor casts a roving eye across the areaway.” Perched like a gargoyle on the roof corner of his apartment building and nearly lost in shadow, a Peeping Tom spies on an unsuspecting young woman as she undresses. A bright light warmly illuminates her room and the contours of her body, underscoring her desirability. By contrast, the cold, impersonal city looms into infinity.
Like Night Windows, Turning Out the Light allows the viewer voyeuristic access into a private experience. A scene the artist saw along Thirty-Fifth Street in New York, a woman in a loose-fitting nightgown has risen from bed to turn down a gas sconce and now turns back toward her male companion. Her assertive posture and action transform her somewhat into a personification of female sexual liberation and, thus, an emblem of turn-of-the-century feminism, for which the artist advocated. The artist’s attenuated lines enhance the print’s sensuous subject.
Night Windows and Turning Out the Light belong to a series of ten prints that Sloan titled New York City Life. Officials of the American Watercolor Society rejected several of the prints as vulgar and indecent when the artist submitted them for the Society’s annual exhibition in 1905.
MD
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2010.120 |
