Glackens as Illustrator

September 5, 2009 to May 3, 2010

Curator Notes

William Glackens (1870-1938) began drawing while still in high school and by age 21 had become an artist-reporter, working at a succession of local newspapers - Philadelphia Record, Philadelphia Press, and the Philadelphia Public Ledger.Blessed with a photographic memory and remarkable dexterity, he became an expert at capturing crowd scenes and unexpected disasters.

Glackens’ graphic body of work was both varied and multi-purpose. He was equally adept in charcoal, pen-and-ink, watercolor, and etching, which he notoriously loathed and found frustrating. Glackens’ line was charged with meaning and purpose, conveying human emotion and state of mind. His crowd scenes are never monolithic, but an assemblage of very personal vignettes. By 1919, his career as an illustrator came to a sudden halt. His abandonment of this particular discipline was most likely due to the unstoppable advancements made in the field of photography. By 1901, the medium of photography became available to the mass-market with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.

All of the works of art in Glackens as Illustrator have been selected from the Glackens estate of over 500 works given to the museum in 1990 by his son Ira Glackens.

The exhibition has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sansom Foundation. The Sansom Foundation, founded by Ira and Nancy Glackens in the 1950s and named after the street in Philadelphia where William was born, has been a major supporter of the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale for close to two decades. To their generosity, we are indebted. Additional support is provided in part by the Broward County Board of County Commissioners as recommended by the Broward Cultural Council.