Word: ashcans
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...painters who reported on it were nicknamed the Ashcan School by a critic in the 1930s, and the label has stuck. They were Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens and George Bellows, and among them they created the first art of urban America. The current show at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, "Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York," is a fine introduction to their work...
...most lyrical--but also the most politically acerbic--of the Ashcan artists was Sloan. A fervent admirer of the social vision of French lithographers, especially Gavarni and Daumier, he kept his satire for the illustrations he did for The Masses and other left-wing magazines. His painted world was more amiable, with its fleshy, rosy girls in dance halls or promenading in Washington Square Park--a Brooklyn Fragonard whispering to a Hester Street Renoir. Sloan saw his people as part of a larger totality, the carnal and cozy body of the city itself, where even the searchlight...
...immersed in mess--a manual worker of images. This makes him one with the city and its people. For poetic spirit, he should emulate Walt Whitman, learning to embrace the body of the city and contain multitudes, dirt and all. The masculine realism of Winslow Homer inspired all the Ashcan artists--they, especially Henri and Bellows, wanted to be Homers of the city...
...terrific nose for a story. One of the biggest in New York circa 1909 was illicit prizefighting, and Bellows made intensely vivid and memorable images of it. Ashcan painting, in its description of the Darwinian world of fists evoked by American realist writers like Frank Norris and Jack London, lagged behind literature by 10 years or more, but its attachment to images of clash and struggle aligned it squarely with the American cultural ideology of the day--Theodore Roosevelt's praise of the strenuous life...
...origins. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Kline had an entirely traditional training at the Art Students League in Boston, wanted to be an illustrator and studied for a time (1936-38) in London. He was imbued with the thick-massed but linear realism that came out of the Ashcan School and filled the cartoons that John Sloan and others did for periodicals like the New Masses. He doted on Krazy Kat (as did his friend Philip Guston) and the superstylish illustrations of John Held Jr. The black-and-white tradition was in his head, where it coexisted with a considerable...