One of my favorite schools of painting, perhaps because I'm a native New Yorker, is that of the Ashcan Artists - Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan and George Bellows. From roughly 1904 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914 they pioneered a distinctive style of American realism. The group actually had its beginnings in Philadelphia in the 1890's where most of its members were employed as illustrators at the city's newspapers. It was Henri who drew them together there with the inspirational Tuesday evening talks he gave at his studio. Rebecca Zurier's essay, "The Making of Six New York Artists," fails to mention, though, that Henri and several of his protégés had previously studied under Thomas Anshutz, a former student of Thomas Eakins, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After the artists had relocated to New York City the movement gained its greatest renown with the show of "the Eight" at Macbeth Galleries in 1908. (The membership of the Ashcan Artists and the Eight was not identical. Three of the Eight – Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast - did not paint in the Ashcan style while George Bellows, who did, was not included in the 1908 exhibit.)
If there was a literary inspiration for the Ashcan Artists, it was certainly Walt Whitman whose celebration of the common man and the American spirit was embodied in their paintings. As political radicals (Sloan was a member of the Socialist Party and served on the editorial board of The Masses), the artists did not hesitate to go into the tenements and red light districts and make them the subject of their paintings. It was this that distinguished their work from other strands of American realism. And in this sense New York City was the perfect subject for their art. Robert Snyder's essay "City in Transition" begins:
"The greatest theater in New York has always been the theater of its streets, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century. The city that emerged was both coarse and inspiring. Tenements sprawled in the shadows of skyscrapers. Sidewalks rang with a symphony of languages. Street-corner socialists battled sweatshop tyrants. Bright lights illuminated nickelodeons and vaudeville theaters, the new temples of mass culture."
But the paintings these artists produced were not in any way didactic but rather celebrations of the teeming life that filled the streets from the Battery to Harlem. They portrayed the immigrants in their ethnic neighborhoods, the shopgirls on their way to work, the crowds gathered underneath the elevated lines to hear election results with pure affection. They realized that it was these masses of people pursuing their dreams and enjoying their leisure that made this country great. It's no accident that the longest essay in the book is Snyder and Zurier's "Picturing the City."
What makes this book especially poignant is the fact that when it was published much of the New York City the Ashcan Artists portrayed could still be found in spirit if not in fact. The rich still lived side by side with the poor and the same polyglot mixture of peoples could still be seen following their traditional routines. In the last twenty years, though, that New York City has disappeared as real estate interests have transformed the city into an enclave that's now exclusively for the rich. The vibrance and zest for life is gone now as venerable institutions are put out of business and the buildings that housed them torn down to make way for high-rise condos. The few venues that remain, such as McSorley's in the East Village, are nothing more than museums left intact to provide local color.
Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York was published to accompany a 1995-1996 exhibit of the same name presented by the National Museum of American Art. It consists of a series of well written essays by Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder and Virginia M. Mecklenburg and a huge number of reproductions, not only of the Ashcan Artists' paintings, but of photographs, postcards, newspaper clippings and memorabilia from the period in which they worked. Together they bring back to life, if only in print, the dynamic metropolis New York City was at the beginning of the twentieth century when everything seemed possible to its inhabitants. It's not so much a scholarly work as a loving tribute.
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