The Aschan school is a term that came to define a group of promising young artists in the early 20th century. They chose to paint from what they could see in their world. The bustling life of New York City provided a wealth of subject matter. A critic who did not appreciate their choice of subject—alleys, tenements, and slum dwellings—coined the term Ashcan school. The motivation behind the artistic group was to bring art and life together in an American version of realism and naturalism.
No group of artists better defines the movement than “The Eight” of the Ashcan movement. The original Eight was composed of Robert Henri, the leader, John Sloan, Arthur Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Predergast, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, and George Luks. Other promising artists of the era, such as George Bellows, were considered to be part of the group. Each of the artists had his own take on life in the city. Luks, Sloan, Glackens, and Shinn were newspaper illustrators and cartoonists.
Robert Henri taught at the Art Students League and other schools in New York City. He championed exhibitions, but he did not grade art. Henri promoted the idea that art was in the eye of the beholder. He summed up his personal philosophy and the movement’s when he told his art classes to “forget about art and paint pictures of what interests you about life.” For these artists, the strain and struggle of urban life was what fascinated them. They were known to create “art for art’s sake.” They broke from conventional notions that art could be viewed broken down and dissected to determine its worth. The artists of the Ashcan school defined art within the context of life. Henri noted that “the object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” These artists wanted to experience life; through life, they would be able to produce art.
The Ashcan school began to disintegrate as it gained notoriety. In 1908 the Eight exhibited their work at the Macbeth Gallery. They soon earned a dubious reputation as the apostles of ugliness. The ugliness was not a comment on their abilities as artists; it was an attack on their subject matter. This form of creativity began to attract a sizable following. Within a short time after the showing, the group was incorporated into a larger, more diverse group. Edward Hopper, Glenn Coleman, Eugene Higgins, and Jerome Myers were other prominent members of the emerging Ashcan school. Later on they sponsored the Armory Show of 1913, which exhibited many new European painters as well.
This Ashcan school helped form the base from which 20th-century American painting developed. In the process, these New Yorkers created an American style of art that would profoundly rebel against the tradition of European artistic interpretations. It was, as Henri had hoped, art for art’s sake.
See also ART.
Further reading: Ira Glackens, William Glackens and The Eight: The Artists Who Freed American Art (New York: Horizon Books, 1957).
—Steve Freund
World History
