John Sloan's Women

Book excerpt: "Challenging the cornerstone assumption of Sloan as a neutral spectator, Coco suggests the ways that he used art to define himself as both man and artist, at a time when the ideals of masculinity and artistic identity were at issue. Examining his self-admitted fear of women, she demonstrates how Sloan's perception of them, as potentially threatening to his manhood and his career, manifests itself subtextually in the fetishized nature of his windowed compositions.".