Ashcan school

For more information on The Eight, visit Britannica.com.

Term first used by Holger Cahill and Alfred Barr in Art in America (New York, 1934) and loosely applied to American urban realist painters. In particular it referred to those members of THE EIGHT (ii) who shortly after 1900 began to portray ordinary aspects of city life in their paintings, for example George Luks's painting Closing the Caf? (1904; Utica, NY, Munson-Williams-Proctor Inst.). Robert Henri, John Sloan, William J. Glackens, Everett Shinn and George Luks were the core of an informal association of painters who, in reaction against the prevailing restrictive academic exhibition procedures, mounted a controversial independent exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries, New York (1908).

See the Abbreviations for further details.

A group of artists loosely formed a group they called "the Eight" or the Ashcan School because they could find art in the "ashcans" of dirty cities. Led by Robert Henri, the group included George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson, and later it added Henri's prized student George Bellows.

Not a formal society or school, as all were fiercely independent, they shared a common look at every day life through the lens of a journalist and the soul of a poet. Many had work experience as illustrators at magazines or newspapers, which contributed to their journalistic approach. The Ashcan artists disdained the academic pretensions of the established art world, while critics, who did not want to see such vulgarity displayed in art, called the group "the Revolutionary Black Gang."

The Eight held its first exhibition in 1908 and another in 1910. The show was so popular and sensational that riot police had to be called to subdue the crowd. The true impact of the Ashcan School did not occur until three years later with the Armory Show, by some accounts the most important exhibit ever held in the United States. The Armory Show shocked the public by showcasing the outrageous styles adopted by the Eight and by European artists, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, and Henri Matisse. Despite the critical turmoil, more than 300,000

Americans saw the Armory Show, which invented the term "modern art."

Henri and the other original members of the Ashcan movement took Winslow Homer as their spiritual guide and also looked to the great poet Walt Whitman for inspiration. Bellows used the gritty streets as his guide, including the illegal boxing clubs of the early 1900s. His Stag at Sharkey's (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) are possibly the most powerful paintings stemming from the group.

Bibliography

Braider, Donald. George Bellows and the Ashcan School of Painting. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.

Perlman, Bennard B. Painters of the Ashcan School: The Immortal Eight. New York: Dover, 1988.

—Bob Batchelor

"The Eight" redirects here. For the novel by Katherine Neville, see The Eight (novel).

John French Sloan, Self-portrait, 1890, oil on window shade, 14 x 11 7/8 inches, Delaware Art Museum, Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1970. John Sloan was a leading member of the Ashcan School.

The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement is most associated with a group known as The Eight, whose members included five painters associated with the Ashcan school: William Glackens (1870-1938), Robert Henri (1865-1929), George Luks (1867-1933), Everett Shinn (1876-1953) and John French Sloan (1871-1951), along with Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928), Ernest Lawson (1873-1939) and Maurice Prendergast (1859-1924). All five members of the Ashcan School studied with Thomas Pollock Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Contents 1 Origin with The Eight 2 Ashcan school gallery 3 See also 4 Notes 5 References

Origin with The Eight

Ashcan School artists & friends at John French Sloan's Philadelphia Studio, 1898

The Eight was a group of artists, many of whom had experience as newspaper illustrators in Philadelphia, who exhibited as a group only once, at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1908. The show, which created a sensation, subsequently toured the US under the auspices of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Eight are remembered as a group, despite the fact that their work was very diverse in terms of style and subject matter—only five of the artists (Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Shinn, and Luks) painted the gritty urban scenes that characterized the Ashcan School.

As noted, the Ashcan School was not an organized group. Their unity consisted of a desire to tell some truths about the dirty city. Robert Henri "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."^[1] The first known use of the "ash can" terminology in describing the movement was by Art Young, in 1916,^[2] but the term was applied later to a group of artists, including Henri, Glackens, Edward Hopper (a student of Henri), Shinn, Sloan, Luks, George Bellows (another student of Henri), Mabel Dwight, and others such as photographer Jacob Riis, who portrayed urban subject matter, also primarily of New York's working class neighborhoods. (Hopper's inclusion in the group [which he forswore] is ironic: his depictions of city streets are almost entirely free of the usual minutiae, with not a single incidental ashcan in sight.)^[3]

The artists of the Ashcan School rebelled against the genteel American Impressionism that represented the vanguard of American art at the time. Their works, generally dark in tone, captured the spontaneous moments of life and often depicted such subjects as prostitutes, drunks, butchered pigs, overflowing tenements with laundry hanging on lines, boxing matches, and wrestlers. It was their frequent, although not total, focus upon poverty and the daily realities of urban life that prompted American critics to consider them the fringe of modern art.

Ashcan school gallery

Robert Henri, Snow in New York, 1902, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Everett Shinn, Cross Streets of New York, 1899, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

William Glackens, Italo-American Celebration, Washington Square, 1912, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

John French Sloan, McSorley's Bar, 1912, oil on canvas, 66.04 x 81.28 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts

George Luks, Houston Street 1917, oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum

See also

• American realism
• Realism (visual arts)

Notes

1. ^ Robert Hughes American Visions BBCtv series
2. ^ Loughery, 1997, pp. 218–19
3. ^ Wells, Walter, Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper, London/New York: Phaidon, 2007

References

• Loughery, John (1997). John Sloan: Painter and Rebel. New York: Holt. ISBN 0-8050-5221-6

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