Joined together 1913

Louis Glackens made this chromolithograph, sometime in the late 19th, early 20th century, and it's a real whopper! I’m picturing Glackens with his pens and inks, really laying down those graphic lines, working and reworking the marks, maybe feeling ambivalent about the subject matter. I see Uncle Sam, all razzle-dazzle, holding a firecracker with a Chinese Official against a backdrop of a fierce eagle and dragon in battle. What a collision of cultures! The dragon is rendered with such fluidity and a strong sense of movement, while Uncle Sam stands rigid and slightly awkward. And the firecracker is in-between, an emblem of danger and perhaps, opportunity. I wonder what Glackens felt about the state of the world back then. His contemporaries like John Sloan used a similar representational style to depict street scenes, and their styles feel intimately connected, like kindred spirits. Ultimately, painting is about exchange, where the past informs the present, and artists, both living and dead, are in perpetual conversation, inspiring each other’s creativity.