Ashcan painters made the ordinary into art

Insight on the News, Jan 1, 1996 by Joanna Shaw-Eagle

A group of artists in New York at the turn of the century defied convention to chronicle life in the big city. They become known as the Ashcan School, dedicated to capturing everyday life on convas.

At the turn of the century, Robert Henri exhorted his fellow artists Ato "go out in the streets and look at life." They did just that. George Bellows depicted wealthy New Yorkers' fascination with boxers; John Sloan etched tenement rooftops sizzling in the heat; George Luks and Everett Shinn painted the glamour and joy of the theater and vaudeville; and William Glackens captured bathers at Coney Island, skaters in Central Park and dhyistm'as shoppers in Madison Square.

Together they became known as the "Ashcan School" -- taking common life as their subject -- and their works depicting early 20th-century New York have been brought together for the first time for "Metropolitan Lives"' an exhibition mounted through March 17 at the National Museum of American Art in Washington.

Originally based in Philadelphia under the leadership of Henri, the group migrated to New York in 1904. Sloan, Glackens, Shinn and Luks were newspaper artists whose work had been lost to photography. Because they were illustrators and journalists, they created their images with quick, slashing lines and broad brush strokes. Henri himself was inspired by the Goyas he saw in Madrid and the Manets in Paris to develop the loose realism he and his group celebrated.

Inevitably, the Ashcan artists were drawn to New York -- to the dynamics of its skyscrapers, parks, subways, theaters and nightclubs. New York was the shipping, manufacturing, commercial and entertainment hub of the United States and the Ashcan artists trumpeted its power and energy. Most of all, these artists were drawn to people. In

New York, the rich met the poor, society ladies ran into office secretaries, immigrants flooded Ellis Island.

New York was "shock city," according to Virginia Mecklenburg, the chief curator and exhibit organizer at the National Museum of American Art who chose the show's theme. "Because so many lenders responded so enthusiastically to the idea of focusing on the New York images," she says, the show features the best-known works by each of the artists: Sloan's Hairdressers' Window, Bellows' Stag at Sharkey's, Luks' The Spielers, Glackens' Hammerstein's Roof Garden, Henri's Salome and Shinn's Footlight Flirtation. In addition to the 85 first-rate paintings, drawings and prints that Mecklenburg has borrowed from collections around the country, she has added more than 150 photographs, postcards, sheet-music covers and newspaper clippings that show how closely the Ashcan artists reflected popular culture.

The Ashcan artists vividly illustrated the crucial issues of the day -- crime, immigration, women's rights, consumerism and poverty -- many of which are still debated. Bellows, also an illustrator for The Masses magazine, once drew a sweltering street scene he titled Why Don't They All Go to the Country for a Vacation? Kids are crying, babies crawl on the hot pavement, laundry swings from fire escapes. Sloany Fifth Avenue, New York, on the other hand, spoofs wealthy, expensively dressed ladies parading down New York's most elegant avenue.

But Sloan's hurtling elevated train in the exhibit's first painting, Six O'clock, Winter, sums up the show's and the city's dynamism. Light is fading in the night sky and commuters are hurrying under the tracks while the train shoots off like a bullet -- one can almost hear the rumble. Bellows also captured the barely controlled chaos of the city, expressing the precarious balance between the old and new in Steaming Streets, in which a man pulls at a rearing horse spooked by a smoke-shrouded train. As one contemporary wrote of another of Bellows' paintings, New York: "When you first see it you are filled with amazement, so full is it of motion.... Men and women are hurrying across the streets, trolleys are clanging their way in and out, a policeman is keeping people from being run over, you feel the run, you hear the noise and you wish you were safely home'

The exhibit also explores the brighter side of big-city life. Young working women were able to shop with their own money, and shopping became a favorite pastime. Macy's at Herald Square claimed it was the largest store in the world, displaying its wares in new plate-glass windows. The entertainment industry was booming, with roof-garden spectacles, vaudeville theaters, nickelo on arcades, the Broadway stage and movies.

The Ashcan artists put it all on canvas. Luks, for example, painted two awkward young people trying to break into vaudeville at one of the many amateur nights staged throughout the city. Henri's Salome, rejected for a National Academy of Design exhibition because of its daring eroticism, epitomized how these artists tested the boundaries between high and low culture.

Mecklenburg and her associate guest curators, Rebecca Zurier and Robert W Snyder, have assembled a fascinating show that captures the best of these artists' works and the intensity of life in the city they portrayed. The exhibit, supported by the William R. and Nora H. Lichtenberg Foundation, the Overbrook Foundation, Richard J. Schwartz and the Smithsonian's Special Exhibition Fund, can be seen at the National Museum daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.