Beauty in the City

The Ashcan School

Robert A. Slayton

• Publisher: Excelsior Editions
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438466439
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

Gold Medalist, 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the US Northeast -Best Regional Non-Fiction Category
Finalist for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Regional category
Silver Winner, 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in the History category At the beginning of the twentieth century the Ashcan School of Art blazed onto the art scene, introducing a revolutionary vision of New York City. In contrast to the elite artists who painted the upper class bedecked in finery, in front of magnificent structures, or the progressive reformers who photographed the city as a slum, hopeless and full of despair, the Ashcan School held the unique belief that the industrial working-class city was a fit subject for great art. In Beauty in the City, Robert A. Slayton illustrates how these artists portrayed the working classes with respect and gloried in the drama of the subways and excavation sites, the office towers, and immigrant housing. Their art captured the emerging metropolis in all its facets, with its potent machinery and its class, ethnic, and gender issues. By exposing the realities of this new, modern America through their art—expressed in what they chose to draw, not in how they drew it—they created one of the great American art forms.

CHAPTER ONE

AND LIKE THAT … THEY’RE GONE

THE ASHCAN ARTISTS DREW A PART OF THE CITY NOT PREVIOUSLY THE SUBJECT OF GREAT ART, capturing the laundry lines, the crowded quarters, the smokestacks, and yes, the ashcans of the urban working class.

Befitting an analysis of such iconoclastic work, this study also takes a different approach. This is not a work of art history; there will be no attempt to analyze the aesthetics of the Ashcan painters, the brushstrokes they employed to tell their stories. Rather, this is explicitly a work of history—not art history—and should be understood within that discipline.

Instead, the vantage point will be that of a social historian; it is content that concerns us here. What did the Ashcan artists contribute to our understanding of the city during its boom era in American history? And what do these answers tell us about the development of American society when it was being transformed by the great forces of urbanization and industrialization? The answers to these powerful questions lie in the study of artists of ashcans.

Ashcan artists recognized that the city was the most exciting place to be in America at the start of a new century; their art has since lasted because that vision remains true amid the current vibrancy of places like New York City. By depicting the immense power and the allure of the metropolis, these artists captured an eternal truth. They created paintings of glorious yet gritty moments in time, construction sites and ferry boats, tenement apartments and newsboys and working women and men. They also bestowed on these urban players a respect that other artists had overlooked.

Another unique aspect of the Ashcan painters was their class perspective. Conventional artists at the time saw either the genteel upper bourgeois or the sad, despairing, downtrodden. The Ashcan school rejected both these impressions and instead focused on the broad middle, painting the working-class people that made up most of the city’s population.

Ashcan artists understood that while city life was tough, it was also quite livable. You could find romance and a lover, join a neighborhood community, play games on the street, or watch illegal boxing matches. No artistic genre ever understood these features of city life with the same sensitivity and insight, one of the key points that made the Ashcan school unique.

By so doing, the Ashcan painters helped the rest of America understand these new places, these dense, novel, and frightening cities. This was at the height, the golden age, of the great American city and of the Progressive Era in art and literature and reform politics. Ashcan artists’ unique renderings of this epic moment became a kind of guidebook for Americans in so many other kinds of locales, teaching them that decent people lived decent lives, even in Gotham. By instilling new, gritty subject matter with beauty, these painters made the urban scene part of the American experience.

The Ashcan artists painted the city as no school of art had ever done before. They understood the excitement of the metropolis and respected the working people who lived there, endowing these people with agency, the power to control the terms of their existence. Not surprisingly, art like this began in protest against the established order.

If you were a part of the American art scene as the clock struck in the new century on January 1, 1900, you knew exactly what the establishment was, and who presided over it. Bennard Perlman, who wrote several books on the art movements of this new era, summed up the status quo of that time: “Throughout the 19th and early 20th century the National Academy of Design dictated the course of American art, promoting the restrictive style that favored classical subjects and techniques.” “Dictate” is a strong and tyrannical word, yet it seems chillingly accurate: “The annual juried exhibitions sponsored by the Academy were the artists’ primary entrée to patrons and subsequent sales. Acceptance to the Academy’s shows offered painters credibility and marketability; rejection could signal the opposite.” This was immense power, the ability to make or starve a painter. Yet it was all in service to faded themes; Perlman reported, “Original subject matter or technique often guaranteed a painter that rejection.”1

Not that everyone approved of this structure. Theodore Dreiser, in his critique of the art world, The “Genius,” observed of the school his protagonist attended, “The class instructors must be of considerable significance in the American art world … or they were N.A.s, and that meant National Academicians. He little knew with what contempt this honor was received in some quarters, or he would not have attached so much significance to it.”2

This rigid, outdated approach created problems, blocking new schools, new works. John Baur, in his study of modern American art, pointed out: “Aside from his art itself, the knottiest problem for the American modernist in the early years of the century was where to exhibit. The annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design were still the principal medium; in how many biographies one reads sentences like Lloyd Goodrich’s concerning Weber: ‘He submitted work to a National Academy exhibition and was of course rejected, and never tried again.’ ” Many artists considered the Academy “the repository of an outworn and deadening system … an oversized, lumbering relic of the aesthetic age of dinosaurs, spiritually extinct but inexplicably still moving.” John Sloan described it as “a place where you checked your brain at the door.”3

Rebellion was inevitable. It began in 1906, when at their winter exhibition the Academy hung Sloan’s submissions high above eye level, making them difficult to see and sure to be ignored. Robert Henri, the philosopher and leader of the Ashcan school, managed to include three of his own works, but William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn—other Ashcan artists—were completely excluded.4

Tempers flared the following year. Henri himself had been appointed to the jury for the 1907 show, but the honor was shallow. His recommendations were largely ignored: Sloan’s submission went up high once again, and others were rejected entirely. Even more demeaning, Henri faced personal rejection; he had submitted three paintings, and on the first balloting, two of these received a rating of 1 (unanimous approval), the other only a 2 (approval by a majority required). On a second vote, one of the works in the first category was downgraded to a 2.5

Henri walked out, pulled his paintings, and contacted the press. Long known as a good source for a quote, Henri had reporters’ ears. In quick time, the story, to use a modern term, went viral. The American Art News revealed, “Robert Henri’s withdrawal … has caused a stir in art circles. At a meeting of the jury, of which Mr. Henri was a member, some spirited remarks were made by him … that … a majority of the judges were not inclined to yield to any innovations in art.” The final denouement was a feature article in Harper’s Weekly, which bemoaned the “penalization of originality.”

Instead, it extolled the “school of Robert Henri,” whose “painters convince us of their democratic outlook. They seek what is significant, what is real.”6

The maître gathered his partners to revolt against the Art Establishment. “After dinner I went to a meeting at Henri’s to talk over a possible exhibition of the ‘crowd’s’ work next year,” John Sloan wrote in his diary on April 4, 1907, “The spirit to push the thing through seems strong.” Besides Henri and Sloan, other charter members included George Luks, Arthur Davies, William Glackens, and Ernest Lawson. Decades later, Everett Shinn, one of the first to join them, recalled, “Not one of us had a program … sure, we were against the monocle pictures at the Academy, but that was all.”7

So they wanted to put on a show; now they had to find a hall. William Macbeth provided the venue. The entrepreneur landed in America in 1871, emigrating from his native Ireland; seeking employment, he obtained a position with the print sellers Frederick Keppel and Co., and within a decade he was a full partner.8

In 1892 he branched out on his own, opening a gallery at 237 Fifth Avenue, near Twenty-Seventh Street, not far from the Flatiron Building, by 1908 relocating to Fortieth Street and Fifth Avenue. What made this venture unique was that, bucking prevailing tastes for European art, Macbeth opened the first gallery in the city dedicated to American works. He told the marketplace, “The work of American artists has never received the full share of appreciation that it deserves and the time has come when an effort should be made to gain for it the favor of those who have hitherto purchased foreign pictures exclusively.”9

Macbeth was an innovator in other ways as well, as he set out with passion to make his experiment work. New shows appeared regularly, often within a few weeks of each other, guaranteeing a steady stream of press notices. To reach out to buyers, he created his own periodical, Art Notes, part house organ and part commentary on the art world, and edited it personally until his death in 1917. As a result, according to one scholar, Macbeth soon “stood at the center of … contemporary American painting. He was at this time the most active, knowledgeable, and powerful dealer in American art.10

For the Ashcan artists, introductions were easy; Macbeth already knew most of the group. In 1902 he had hosted Henri’s first one-man show in Gotham; the two had enjoyed a correspondence as early as 1899. The gallery owner soon worked with the others as well.

A deal was struck. Various accounts list Henri as the go-between, but all agree on the arrangements. Sloan visited Macbeth, who requested a guarantee of $500, later reduced to $400 (Sloan felt him, “a decent man if ever was one”), and paid in sums of $50 apiece by eight artists on May 2.11

Details began to solidify. Sloan organized specifics, handled funds, worked on the catalog, read proofs, and prepared mailing lists. One tricky decision involved whom to include. Of course, there were the Ashcan stalwarts—Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens. Boosting their numbers were Boston artist Maurice Prendergast, impressionist Ernest Lawson, and Arthur Davies. The group quickly dubbed itself “The Eight Independent Artists.” Critics and later scholars shortened this to “The Eight” and immortalized them for this pioneering showcase; they would never exhibit together again. While the last three were not Ashcan artists by any stretch, others who worked in this style were turned down. According to one account, “Davies was the strangest member of the group in that his painting, in their subject and style, suggest no affinity whatsoever” with the others. Lawson, on the other hand, “seems to have been invited … simply because everyone liked him and accepted that he was a very gifted painter.” Sloan later debated whether they should have dropped Shinn and instead added Jerome Myers (who was hurt by his exclusion). George Wesley Bellows, whom everyone recognized as a prodigy, was deemed to be too young. Each artist had twenty-five running feet of wall space, could choose which paintings to display and hang them himself. By December 19, 1907, a New York Herald article commented that “these painters believe they can reveal an art more forceful and individual” than any seen in New York.12

Opening day drew near. Publicity was assured; most of the artists had launched their careers by doing illustrations for the print media and so had plenty of contacts in the newspaper and magazine world. Two days prior to the event, the Evening Post crowed, “The principal art event of next week will be the opening … at the Macbeth galleries.” Twenty-five hundred announcements were dropped in the mail, and papers started running announcements as early as two weeks before opening day. “The pictures left for Macbeth’s in the morning,” Sloan noted in his diary on February 1, 1908. “Now the time that we have all waited and worked for months past is here.”13

February 3, 1908, was a cold New York day (fig. 1.1). Snow had fallen a week prior, and ice and slush lingered on the city’s streets. The Tribune’s weather page that morning recorded the previous day’s high as twenty-five degrees, the trough at fifteen.14

1.1 Front page of the exhibition catalog, Exhibition of Paintings by Arthur B. Davies, William J. Glackens, Robert Henri, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice B. Prendergast, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, February 3–15, 1908. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Thomas J. Watson Library (118 R19). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.

No matter; as long as Macbeth’s stayed open—from 9 am to 6 pm—the gallery would be packed. His upper space had two rooms, the paintings to be divided evenly between them. Visitors braved a small, crowded elevator to get there. Upon exiting, they moved to their right, exploring the works of Shinn, Lawson, Sloan, and Prendergast, then moved through an archway to view those by Luks, Henri, Glackens, and Davies. ...