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Aiming to portray the downtrodden, the group of painters didn’t succeed in their mission, but nevertheless became a part of American art history
The Ashcan School and The Eight, by Brandon Ruud. Published by Lucia Marquand
Brandon Ruud, The Ashcan School and The Eight. Milwaukee Art Museum
In 1908, a group of American painters known as “The Eight” embraced the idea of painting pictures of the proletariat, their workplaces, and their urban homes. They were Robert Henri and a following of his students at the New York School of Art, Arthur Bowen Davies, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan.
Although The Eight painted working-class people and working-class neighborhoods, they weren’t aggressive enough in their embrace of utopian socialism for the petit-bourgeois socialist rag, The Masses, which slurred them in 1916 as nothing but painters wasting their time making “pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts on Horatio Street” instead of acting as useful revolutionary propagandists painting the oppressed victims of the haute-bourgeois captains of industry and government. By then, another of Henri’s students, George Bellows, had joined them, spoiling their first soubriquet by simple addition but perhaps balancing the equation of the poor quality of their work with some excellence, and because the slur struck the ring of truth, it stuck as their new nomenclature, and they became known as “The Ashcan School.” The slur must have stung, for Sloan had been art editor of The Masses since 1912. (He quit in 1916 over arguments about captions to cartoons.)
This is not an introductory picture book designed for readers interested in enjoying a collection of the Ashcan School’s few greatest hits – the selected paintings are all from the collection of the Milwaukee Museum of Art, and mostly the equivalents of B-sides and outtakes, and the text is more appropriate reading for completist enthusiasts and academic specialists in the history and context of the painters. However, the book does expand on the received image of the Ashcan School as a group of single-minded propagandists, presenting scholarly studies of them as inquisitive painters with a deep appreciation for the city, and the land, and the people, and a desire to find and capture their elusive character.
George Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo, lithograph
Setting the unconventional tone, Brandon Ruud’s first chapter is focused on Henri’s landscapes and notes the lack of figures in his grimy paintings of industrial buildings, seeing in them a move away from the issues of the proletariat. Although Henri’s moody impressionist Wyoming Valley is a crude and impoverished daub compared to the finesse of Thomas Cole’s Storm in the Wilderness, Ruud notes that it is “almost reactionary” in comparison to Henri’s industrial paintings of the same period. His revolutionary zeal softened more as he aged – although permanently associated with the struggle of the working class, Henri learned a transcendent approach to radical change as he matured, and admired Hardesty Maratta, whose almost mystical aesthetic theory asserted a relationship between colors and musical notes which sits better with Wassily Kandinsky’s numinous esoterism than with the hard concrete realities of class struggle.
Margarita Karasoulas follows Ruud with a chapter written in stiffly academic style on the significance of immigration in Greenwich Village to Glackens and Luks, commenting on the racism suffered by members of the Italian colony. She concludes, “As these paintings reveal, ethnic enclaves were more than just a geographical location; they were deeply contested and ideologically charged sites in which the internal space of the body was conflated with the external space of the city and, on a broader scale, the nation itself.”
John Fagg’s genial chapter “The Unseen City” is an appealing piece of writing about the “semi-private, partially hidden New York of cellar bars and art-world studios,” which properly represents the painter as an explorer of the intimate and unseen city, looking on urban interiors and exteriors as personal, if crowded homes and shared spaces. People slumber on the flat tarred tops of tenements in Sloan’s rough illustrative Roofs, Summer Night; in his Barber Shop, drawn in the linear style of a magazine etching, we wait for our turn for the hirsute attention of two finely mustachioed hairdressers and a manicurist. Sloan hated visiting the barber, and drew the shop as a place of luxury and pretension.
The most interesting essay is Niki Otten’s “The Dynamic Artist,” a study of physiology and perceptual theory in Davies’ dreamy symbolist paintings. Of The Eight, secretive Davies was the most metaphysically oriented, and the most misplaced within the conventional narrative of The Eight’s focus on propaganda. He was President of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors which planned the important Armory Show of 1913 that introduced Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso to America, and provided Marcel Duchamp with the backdrop to his Nude Descending a Staircase, the fractured image which scandalized the art world. Although Davies experimented with cubism for several years after the show, he soon returned to his romantic symbolic style. Otten’s intriguing essay describes Davies’ interest in “continuous composition.” Like Duchamp, as inspiration Davies used chronophotographs taken by Étienne-Jules Marey, who developed a photographic system for revealing the movement of human bodies in a single plate. Unfortunately, Marey’s photographic imagery has more to commend it than most of Davies’ crude paintings and dreary drypoints.
Robert Henri, Chinese Lady
Ruud returns to close the book with a chapter about the Ashcan School collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The collection was based on a substantial donation of paintings owned by Samuel Buckner given to the museum in 1919, and gathers together a selection of works by the Ashcan School painters. Henri’s Chinese Lady stands out as an outlier of quality – while sketchy and stereotypical, it pops vibrantly with its cheerful yellow background. Bellows’ The Sawdust Trail, also jumps from the page as something special, capturing the passion and hysteria of an evangelical revival meeting.
On the cover of the book, the publishers of The Ashcan School and The Eight claim boldly that the group were “creating a national art,” were “America’s first modern art movement,” who “forged a new art that represented America’s shifting values,” but it is hard to find anything in their work that varied greatly in style from what had already be done in Paris on a larger and more dramatic scale years before. A change of cities is not convincing evidence of “new art.” The freshest works of the collection are Sloan’s etchings and Bellows’ lithographs. Nevertheless, the Ashcan School painters were an important part of the mythology of the development of America’s so-called “native art,” and the book helps to debunk ill-formed assumptions.
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