?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
JOHN SLOAN (1871-1951)
Fourteenth Street, the Wigwam. Etching, 1928. 249x178 mm; 9¾x7 inches, full margins. Seventh state (of 7). Edition of 110 (from an intended edition of 100). Signed, titled and inscribed "100 proofs" in pencil, lower margin.
A superb, dark impression. Morse 235.
Sloan's depiction of a crowded New York street outside the headquarters of Tammany Hall, a fraternal society formed in 1789 that became a champion of the working class and was crucial to helping immigrants, especially the Irish, rise in politics in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The society was originally named for Chief Tamanend, a leader of the Lenape people during the colonial era, and its entirely white membership appropriated native terms, such as "wigwam," into club lingo. By the time of Sloan's etching, the Tammany Society was a strong supporter of the Democratic Party but also known for corruption.
The WPA gave opportunities and financial help to many artists who were struggling during the Depression. Sloan, already an established artist and teacher at the Art Students League (who taught many artists who were employed in the WPA programs), did not fit that profile, but he did participate in the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, which hired well-known artists for its projects. He painted the mural The Arrival of the First Mail in Bronxville in 1846 for the post office in Bronxville, New York. He also created two paintings for the WPA, one The Wigwam, Old Tammany Hall, the subject of the current etching, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the other Fourteenth Street at Sixth Avenue, originally hung the office of U.S. Senator Royal Copeland and now is exhibited at the Detroit Insitute of Arts.
