New York City and the Ashcan school

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Virginia M. Mecklenburg

During the first decade of this century, older immigrants were easily absorbed into communities in which language, customs, and dress had been transplanted from their native countries. Their children, however, often chafed at traditional mores. Wald remarked on the wide gap between the generations, noting that clashes were likely to be intensified when Americanized, wage-earning children reversed the relationship of child and parent by providing the family's primary income.(9) Saturday work schedules that intruded on the sanctity of the Jewish sabbath, and exposure to different cultures often resulted in other deep divisions, as is apparent in the popular song "It's Tough When Izzy Rosenstein Loves Genevieve Malone," written in 1910 by Gus Kahn and Grace Le Boy. The Ashcan artists located their paintings within these larger cultural contexts. Luks, for instance, painted immigrant women in Allen Street (Pl. VIII), and showed an assimilated couple with a baby in a curbside market in his 1905 Hester Street;(10) Shinn placed immigrant figures squarely in the center of his compositions; and Glackens often juxtaposed slim modern girls with buxom mothers.

At the beginning of this century, single men - always plentiful in cities - were joined by an unprecedented number of "bachelor girls" living alone or in boardinghouses or hotels for women and enjoying the freedom of a paycheck. Some were teachers or clerks [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED], while others found work as waitresses, laundresses, or scrubwomen. Women's labor was a mainstay of the New York garment industry, and working women were a principal market for the low-cost, ready-to-wear clothes that became widely available. Although women's suffrage was still years away, women's changing roles were celebrated and caricatured in songs, cartoons, and movies. Their efforts to establish greater social and political equality also were recorded in the newspapers. In 1907, for example, the New York World assessed women's progress in "Things a woman can do in New York" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED].

Among the Ashcan artists, Sloan most often depicted newly independent women and the easy camaraderie they shared. In Renganeschi's Saturday Night (Pl. X) he portrayed a group of young women out for a night on the town - a relatively new social phenomenon. The title of the painting and other subtle clues make clear that these are not socialites, but rather working-class women enjoying their leisure away from the watchful eyes of their parents.

It may have been inevitable that women's increasing freedom would prompt concern over the loosening of moral standards. Although it was not a new question, it became the subject of much debate in the early years of this century. Melodramas such as George Scarbrough's The Lure, described in the 1913 playbill as a "drama of terrible truth," brought the issue of prostitution into the popular arena. In his painting Haymarket (Pl. IX), Sloan shows a dance hall in New York's Tenderloin district that was well known as the site of casual liaisons. The New York Sun on March 29, 1903, explained, "Strange women meet strange men there and dance and drink with them. The same women are there night after night providing amusement for the constantly changing crowd of men." In the painting, a young girl, fascinated by the unescorted women and bright lights, is pulled away by her concerned mother. The man loitering beside the doorway was described by the Sun as "a bird of the night looking for its prey."(11) Without moralizing, Sloan has encapsulated the contemporary concern that innocent girls would be dazzled by the glitter without realizing its danger.