Brandywine Museum of Art: Second Floor, Special Exhibition: "John Sloan's Street Theater"

 With every successive floor upward, the Brandywine Museum of Art adds a gallery!  How clever.  Every floor hosts a gallery space in the gigantic Barn structure, but an addition creates more as you climb up.  What is consumed by a large gift shop and adjoining cafe on the ground floor is replaced by an additional gallery, public restrooms and curatorial offices on the second.  The third floor is unencumbered by any distractions and open to hosting three galleries.  Architecturally, the integration between the old and the new holds a cohesion that both anchors one to the solid past while embracing a future of limitless possibilities.  The physical museum you get once you are inside is so much more than what the exterior would seem to promise from the outside.

A palette cleanser awaits us in the second gallery on the second floor.  A little focus exhibition of etchings by the regional artist John Sloan.  A personal favorite from the Ash Can School, it's a wonderful reminder that artists in the 19th and 20th centuries often diversified in order to make their monthly dime.  In a heart, beat I could relate these works to those of any number of other artists like French post impressionists: Honore Daumier and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, or the American contemporary artist, Edward Hopper.  

The power in these images rests in their nod to modernity and the rapidly evolving ethos of American mores.  All by American Artist, John Sloan (1871 - 1951), 5 images to represent the 35 or so in the exhibition.

"Girls Sliding," 1915

"Sculpture In Washington Square," 1925

"Subway Stairs," 1923

"Sunbathing On The Roof," 1925

"Easter Eve, Washington Square," 1926