Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, was an artistic movement in the United States during the late 19th-early 20th century[1] that produced works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the city's poorer neighborhoods.
The artists working in this style included
The movement, which took some inspiration from Walt Whitman's epic poem Leaves of Grass, has been seen as emblematic of the spirit of political rebellion of the period.[2]
Origin and development
The Ashcan School was not an organized movement. The artists who worked in this style did not issue manifestos or even see themselves as a unified group with identical intentions or career goals. Some of the artists were politically minded, and others were apolitical. Their unity consisted of a desire to tell certain truths about the city and modern life they felt had been ignored by the suffocating influence of the Genteel Tradition in the visual arts. Robert Henri, in some ways the spiritual father of this school, "wanted art to be akin to journalism... he wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter."[3] He urged his younger friends and students to paint in the robust, unfettered, ungenteel spirit of his favorite poet, Walt Whitman, and to be unafraid of offending contemporary taste. He believed that working-class and middle-class urban settings would provide better material for modern painters than drawing rooms and salons. Having been to Paris and admired the works of Édouard Manet, Henri also urged his students to ‘’paint the everyday world in America just as it had been done in France.’’[4] By 1904, all of the artists relocated to New York.[5]
The name "Ashcan school" is a
Many of the most famous Ashcan works were painted in the first decade of the century at the same time in which the realist fiction of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris was finding its audience and the muckraking journalists were calling attention to slum conditions.[10] The first known use of the term "ash can art" is credited to artist Art Young in 1916.[11] The term by that time was applied to a large number of painters beyond the original "Philadelphia Five," including George Bellows, Glenn O. Coleman, Jerome Myers, Gifford Beal, Eugene Higgins, Carl Springchorn and Edward Hopper. (Despite his inclusion in the group by some critics, Hopper rejected their focus and never embraced the label; his depictions of city streets were painted in a different spirit, "with not a single incidental ashcan in sight.")[12] Photographers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine were also discussed as Ashcan artists. Like many art-historical terms, "Ashcan art" has sometimes been applied to so many different artists that its meaning has become diluted.
The artists of the Ashcan School rebelled against both
The advent of
Connection to "The Eight"
The Ashcan school is sometimes linked to the group known as "The Eight", though in fact only five members of that group (Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, and Shinn) were Ashcan artists.
The Macbeth Galleries exhibition was held to protest the restrictive exhibition policies of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design and to broadcast the need for wider opportunities to display new art of a more diverse, adventurous quality than the Academy generally permitted. When the exhibition closed in New York, where it attracted considerable attention, it toured Chicago, Toledo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Bridgeport, and Newark in a traveling show organized by John Sloan.[14] Reviews were mixed, but interest was high. ("Big Sensation at the Art Museum, Visitors Join Throng Museum and Join Hot Discussion," one Ohio newspaper noted.)[15] As art historian Judith Zilczer summarized the venture, "In taking their art directly to the American public, The Eight demonstrated that cultural provincialism in the United States was less pervasive than contemporary and subsequent accounts of the period had inferred."[16] Sales and exhibition opportunities for these painters increased significantly in the ensuing years.
Gallery
-
Ashcan School artists, c. 1896, left to right,John French Sloan
-
Thomas Pollock Anshutz, The Farmer and His Son at Harvesting, 1879. Five members of the Ashcan School studied with him, but went on to create quite different styles.
-
Washington, DC
-
George Luks, Street Scene, 1905, Brooklyn Museum
-
Everett Shinn, Cross Streets of New York, 1899, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
-
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
-
John French Sloan, McSorley's Bar, 1912, Detroit Institute of Arts
-
Houston Street, 1917, oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum
-
George Bellows, Both Members of This Club, 1909, National Gallery of Art. Bellows was a close associate of the Ashcan school and had studied under Robert Henri.
-
Jacob Riis, Bandit's Roost, 1888, (photo), considered the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of New York City.
-
Washington, DC.
-
Whitney Museum of American Art
-
Whitney Museum of American Art
See also
- American realism
- Realism (visual arts)
Notes
- ^ "Ashcan School Exhibition". First Art Museum. 13 July 2007. Archived from the original on 26 July 2020.
- ISBN 978-0-226-39589-0.
- American VisionsBBC-TV series (ep.5 - "The Wave From The Atlantic")
- ^ "Art From the Alleys". The Attic. Retrieved 19 March 2019.
- ^ Sylvia Yount (2015-05-26). "The Aschcan School, The Eight, and the New York Art World". Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
- ^ Khalid, Farisa. "The Ashcan School, an introduction". Khan Academy.
- ^ a b Ken Johnson (2007-12-28). "Ashcan Views of New Yorkers, Warts, High Spirits and All". The New York Times. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
- ISBN 0 300 05536 6.
- ^ ISBN 978-0810941724
- ^ Sam Hunter, Modern American Painting and Sculpture (New York: Dell, 1959), 28–40.
- ^ John Loughery, John Sloan: Painter and Rebel (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), pp. 218–219
- ^ Wells, Walter, Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper (London/New York: Phaidon, 2007).
- ^ Yount, Sylvia (26 May 2015). "The Ashcan School, The Eight, and the New York Art World". The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- ^ Loughery, p. 127, 134–140.
- ^ Loughery, p. 135.
- ^ Judith Zilczer, "The Eight on Tour," American Art Journal, 16, no. 3 (Summer 1984), p. 38.
Sources
- Brown, Milton. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.
- Brooks, Van Wyck. John Sloan: A Painter's Life. New York: Dutton, 1955.
- Doezema, Marianne. George Bellows and Urban America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
- Glackens, Ira. William Glackens and the Ashcan School: The Emergence of Realism in American Art. New York: Crown, 1957.
- Homer, William Innes. Robert Henri and His Circle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969.
- Hughes, Robert. American Visions: The Epic Story of Art in America. New York: Knopf, 1997.
- Hunter, Sam. Modern American Painting and Sculpture. New York: Dell, 1959.
- Kennedy, Elizabeth (ed.). The Eight and American Modernisms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
- Loughery, John. John Sloan: Painter and Rebel. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. ISBN 0-8050-5221-6
- Perlman, Bennard (ed.), introduction by Mrs. John Sloan. Revolutionaries of Realism: The Letters of John Sloan and Robert Henri. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
External links
- Documenting the Gilded Age: New York City Exhibitions at the Turn of the 20th Century A New York Art Resources Consortium project. Exhibition catalogs, checklists, and photoarchive material.
- Collection: "Ashcan School" from the University of Michigan Museum of Art