Word: ashcan
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Ever since the "Ashcan" painters of the early igoos went looking for Beauty in alleys and gutters, U.S. artists have prided themselves on smoking the lady out of the most unexpected hiding places. Last week in a Manhattan gallery, Painter James Fosburgh smoked her out again. He had discovered her in a dirty clothes hamper, a rumpled pillow, a tavern jukebox. "Anything can be beautiful if you bother to see its beauty," says Fosburgh. "Even a hamper can be a vision of the world." He makes a handsome still life from a pair of discarded work gloves or a coffee...
ALCAN INTO ASHCAN read a U.S. newspaper headline six years ago. The U.S. Army, which built the Alaska (Alcan) Highway in nine hard-driving months of 1942, had just turned over to Canada the 1,221 miles from the starting point at Dawson Creek, B.C. to the Alaska border. The headline writer, like most Americans who gave the matter any thought, assumed that the Alcan-like its famed World War II counterparts, the Burma and Ledo Roads-was purely a product of military emergency, with no peacetime future...
...today. Now, abstractions are the rage; then, art in the U.S. was spelled with a capital A and stood for dreamy, academic idealizations. The lively glimpses of real people, places and things that Sloan and his friends painted struck art lovers as ugly. The group was scornfully dubbed "The Ashcan School...
Within a decade the Ashcan revolution had been swallowed up in a greater one. The famed Armory show of 1913 (which Sloan helped arrange) introduced School-of-Paris art to the U.S., made stay-at-homes like Sloan seem relatively conservative. "The ultra-modern movement," Sloan later recalled, "was wonderful medicine for adults. But since then the kids have raided the medicine cabinet-and for them, it's drugs...
After being damned for Ashcan art, Sloan was praised by conservatives as a painter of the "American scene." That pleased him little more: "As though you didn't see the American scene whenever you opened your eyes! I am not for the American scene, I am for mental realization. If you are American and work, your work will be American...