#robert smullyan sloan

[rossodimarte]

Robert Smullyan Sloan, African American Soldier, 1945

[nebylitsa]

robert smullyan sloan / jankel adler

[baberoe-archive]

hiiiii everyone im going to make you look at art <3 okay <3

first up we got two photos from august sander's people of the twentieth century, a decades long project he never finished aimed at identifying and organizing the "types" of people in early twentieth century germany. in photos for this project he usually identified people along socio-economic and geographic lines. on the left we have officer, world war i, cologne (1914) and on the right we have boxers, cologne (1928). museum had a bunch of sander on display and they paired it with the shortcut to the systematic life: superficial life (2002) by tsui kuang-yu, which is outside the scope of this post but super interesting so i encourage everyone to look it up lol

up next: the junkers officer (1934) by george grosz, another artist associated with neue sachlichkeit/new objectivity. im not well versed in german art but recently i have been so intrigued by leftist art of the weimar republic and it felt simply serendipitous. unfortunately by the time i saw this the museum was closing in 15 minutes so i had to rush out </3 SAD

this is air war (1944) by ralston crawford. first time i heard of this artist! during wwii he served as chief of the visual presentation unit of the weather division of the army air corps in washington dc and southeast asia.

negro soldier (1945) by robert smullyan sloan. sloan was drafted in 43 and illustrated army educational materials and posters for war bonds. the wall label says the title was given by the artist, which makes me think sloan didn't personally know this guy, which makes me very curious about the circumstances of its production. no name is given to the sitter, but he served in the european-african-middle eastern campaign in the army and was awarded a good conduct medal. sloan has a drawing at the met (station hospital [1943-44] ), but unfortunately i can't find much else about him online that might help contextualize this painting.

i think it pairs really well with this horace pippin from 1943 called mr. prejudice. pippin served in wwi with the harlem hellfighters, and the soldier at center might be a self portrait. he has a pretty good amount of paintings about the war actually -- i normally associate him with landscapes for some reason, though i think thats just because the pippin at my local art museum is a landscape lmao. his illustrated war journals are digitized at the archives of american art if you want to check it out!

up next are some pieces of interest that i want to share but about which i otherwise have little to say

L: untitled (military maneuvers at an abandoned mine) (1940-42) by harry gottlieb

R: italy goes to war (1941) by arthur dove

L: christ before pilate (1949) by david aronson. wall text wants us to note the soldier's helmet is german

R: the funeral (1949) by francisco dosamantes

ending with this delightful 1914 the wrestlers by henri gaudier-brzeska, whom the label quotes as saying, "i went to see the wrestlers -- God! i have seldom seen anything so lovely... they fought with amazing vivacity and spirit, turning in the air, falling back on their heads, and in a flash were up again on the other side, utterly incomprehensible." something about wrestling/boxing that make men gay as fuck. beautiful

[silezukuk]

Robert Smullyan Sloan - Negro Soldier, 1945 // https://tinyurl.com/y8lmo9ue

[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Negro Soldier by Robert Smullyan Sloan, 1945, USA.

[somanyhumanbeings]

Robert Smullyan Sloan, Negro Soldier (1945)

[joshuaoliveira]

Soldado , 1945

Robert Smullyan Sloan

[micmol]

Negro soldier, Robert Smullyan Sloan (detail) #artist #portrait #portraitpainting #instaportrait #portraitpainting #paintings #oilpainting #harvardfoggmuseum #foggmuseum #bostonmuseums #boston #greatart (at Harvard Art Museums)

[sameoldart]

Robert Smullyan Sloan's "Negro Soldier"

After almost eight years of renovations, the building which used to house the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger Museum reopened this past November as the Harvard Art Museums. The Fogg is the oldest of the museums (it opened in 1896) and its collection spans the Middle Ages to the present.

Whenever a museum closes for such an extended period of time, one wonders how the permanent collection will be re-hung, what will be left out, what will be included and what can be discovered and learned. I expected to see certain works, some that I knew and some that I had never seen, but I would have never expected to see anything like Negro Soldier by Robert Smullyan Sloan (1915-2013).

Robert Smullyan Sloan, Negro Soldier, 26 3/4 x 22 3/8 in., egg tempera and oil on board, 1945

The small painting stands apart from all the other works in room 1320 of Harvard's Modern and Contemporary Art galleries. Its clarity, precision and physical presence of its sitter is closer to the work of Hans Holbein the Younger (particularly his portrait of Georg Gisze), than to any painting by Sloan's contemporaries. It is possible to tell that the sitter is leaning back, perhaps against the back of the chair or the window frame. His head is slightly turned away from the viewer, which opens up a view onto a busy street.  This is where many of Norman Rockwell's paintings fail, for example his 1940s Willie Gillis series; his backgrounds tend to look like illusionistic wallpaper: rather than showing a space which extends behind, in front of and around a figure, Rockwell paints as if spaces only existed above, to the right, to the left or below his protagonists.

Norman Rockwell illustration Willi Gillis in College for the Saturday Evening Post in October of 1946

Whenever a painter ventures out to paint 'realistically,' critics and art enthusiasts tend to employ language such as "masterly," "old-masterly" even, "within the great tradition of figurative painting" and so forth. In most cases, the truth is that these newer or contemporary works have nothing in common with the Old Masters - neither in content nor in technique. And technique can be very seductive and misleading: a pretty or well-painted picture does not necessarily make for a good painting; not so in Sloan's case.

Sloan's sitter has returned from the war and has arrived in the apartment of a city that could very well be New York. The two ribbons above his left chest pocket illustrate the soldier's role in the conflict: the red-white ribbon stands for good conduct in the Army, while the other one is the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal. The two service stars indicate that he served in all three conflicts. And now that he has returned what will await him?

From 1943 to 1946, Sloan was illustrating training manuals for the Army education program, but who exactly posed for this painting? How did Sloan meet the soldier ? If he used a photographic source, it is unknown (at least I could not find any further information). During and shortly after WWII, a disproportionately high number of African American soldiers were discharged (also known as the blue discharge) from the military.  This made it difficult if not impossible for these men to find jobs or make use of the G.I. Bill that granted access to free education. 

Robert Smullyan Sloan kept the painting "Negro Soldier" in his private collection from 1945 until 2004 when he sold it to the Fogg Museum. Between 1945 and 2004 the painting was only exhibited three times: in 1947, 1949 and the last time in 1974. Between 1947 and 1974, the art world had moved from Abstract Expressionism, to Minimalism and Fluxus; it does not come as a surprise that Sloan's painting remained almost entirely invisible and unknown during that time.

Sterling Jones in the 2014 documentary Korengal by Sebastian Junger

With the Harvard Art Museums renovations finished, Sloan's painting has finally been granted the exposure it deserves. Not only is this a remarkable and incredibly refined painting, it is also material evidence of the very long road from segregation to civil rights. And as we have witnessed in the past weeks, months and years, this issue remains unresolved.

One recent example of racial inequality within the military are the remarks by US Airborne Specialist Sterling Jones in the 2014 documentary Korengal which is set in the Afghan valley of the same name. During a patrol break, Junger sits down with Sterling while the latter tells him the following:

"As black man, I mean I am the only one in the platoon...I'm one of [counts] one, two, three, four if you count in the cook...five, if you count in the two cooks, black people in the company. [...] You are not going to see too many black dudes, I mean...you see it, I get plenty of shit around here. You'll run into some guys here, they might not admit it right in my face... but they'll tell you that they don't like me. But at the same time, I bet there is not one of them that would say that he wouldn't take me in a fire fight."

If there is something that Sloan's soldier and Sterling Jones share, it is that both fought more than one enemy while abroad. They simultaneously fought for equality and their country; the very same country that denied and continues to deny them equality.