Ashcan School

"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 grew out of a group known as The Eight, whose only show together in 1908 created a sensation. Its members included five painters later 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). They had met studying together under Thomas Pollock Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Other members of The Eight were Arthur B. Davies (1862–1928), Ernest Lawson (1873–1939) and Maurice Prendergast (1859–1924), whose work diverged from the Ashcan School in style.

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 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 because of the impact of their only show, despite the fact that their work was 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 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." The first known use of the "ash can" terminology in describing the movement was by Art Young, in 1916. The term was later applied to a group of artists who portrayed urban subject matter, primarily of New York's working class neighborhoods. These included Robert Henri, George Bellows, Arnold Franz Brasz, Mabel Dwight, William Glackens, Edward Hopper, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John French Sloan, and others such as photographer Jacob Riis. Bellows, Brasz and Hopper were students of Henri. (Despite his inclusion in the group by some critics, Hopper rejected their focus; his depictions of city streets were nearly free of the usual details, "with not a single incidental ashcan in sight.")

The artists of the Ashcan School rebelled against American Impressionism, which was the vanguard of American art at the time. In contrast to its emphasis of light, their works were generally dark in tone, capturing harsher moments of life and often portraying 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 on the fringe of modern art.

Ashcan School and The Eight gallery

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  Ashcan School artists, c. 1896, l to r, Everett Shinn, Robert Henri, John French Sloan

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  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.

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

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

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

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  John French Sloan, McSorley's Bar, 1912, Detroit Institute of Arts

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

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  Edward Hopper, The El Station, 1908, Whitney Museum of American Art

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  George Bellows, Both Members of This Club (1909), National Gallery of Art. Bellows was a close associate of the Ashcan School.

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  Jacob Riis, Bandit's Roost 1888, (photo), considered the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of New York City.

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  Arthur B. Davies, Elysian Fields, oil on canvas, The Phillips Collection Washington, DC.

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  Maurice Prendergast, Central Park, New York 1901, Whitney Museum of American Art

See also

• American realism
• Realism (visual arts)

References

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