"Robert Henri and artists of the Ashcan Circle and the Eight stand today as America's first modern art movement: rejecting their academic training and the centuries-old National Academy of Design's exhibition practice, they forged a new and vital art that represented shifting American values and the country's own sense of identity. The Milwaukee Art Museum holds one of the largest and most important collections of art related to the Ashcan Circle and the Eight in the country, totaling nearly two hundred works across media, including paintings, drawings and illustrations, pastels, and prints. This catalogue features rarely-seen works and popular favorites, emphasizing the Ashcan School's contribution to the formation of American modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century"--
"Around the turn of the century, American art was at a low ebb. Painting was in a hopeless state of nothingness. Sentimental landscapes were produced by the hundreds with little resemblance to the American scene. The established art world showed little of the vitality that marked the rambunctious growth of a nation in the throes of establishing a great free enterprise social order. In Philadelphia and later, New York, artistic rebellion grew up around a group of talented artist-reporters who painted the world as they saw it, in all its beauty and grim reality. The Realist or Ashcan School of Art was born. At first, the Realist painters were despised and rejected because of their choice of subjects -- burlesque houses, Bowery bars, bedrooms, ragged urchins and dingy street scenes. But the biting truth of the Realists' pictorial observations could not be denied. The artists' determination to freely exhibit their art became a virtual battle for survival. This is the true story of the men in the forefront of the struggle to establish the first truly American tendency in art"--Front flap.
"Zurier vividly locates the Ashcan School artists within the early twentieth-century crosscurrents of newspaper journalism, literary realism, illustration, sociology, and urban spectatorship. Her compassionate study newly assesses the artists' rejection of 'genteel' New York, their alignments with mass media, and their innovative ways of seeing in the modern city."—Wanda M. Corn, author of The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-35 If the Ashcan School brought a special and embracing eye to the city, Rebecca Zurier in her richly contextual and impressively interdisciplinary book explains and evokes that historically specific urban vision in all its richness. Finally, in Picturing the City, we have the study these painters have long deserved. And we gain new and delightful access to New York City at the moment of its emergence as a compelling embodiment of metropolitan modernity."—Thomas Bender, Director, International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University "Picturing the City is both meticulous and wide-ranging in its assessment of the Ashcan artists and their passionate efforts to represent New York. It charts their pleasures and problems, warmth and prejudices, generosity and differences, originality and formula. It takes seriously their habits as journalists and provides the most complete sense of their immersion in a world of urban spectatorship and vision. Rebecca Zurier has written a wonderful, timely book that will be a benchmark for any future discussions of them."—Anthony W. Lee, author of Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco "Rebecca Zurier takes us on an intellectually exhilarating and breathtakingly beautiful visual voyage through turn-of-the-century New York City as the Ashcan painters saw it. As we watch them learn a new way of looking in the commercially dynamic, sensual New York of a century ago, we too see that time and place with fresh eyes. Inevitably, thanks to Zurier, the way we look at city life today will change as well."—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
Presents a major new interpretation of the Ashcan School of Art, arguing that these artists made the working-class city at the turn of the century a subject for beautiful art. 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 artexpressed in what they chose to draw, not in how they drew itthey created one of the great American art forms. A delight for the eyes, a treat for city lovers, and a fine example of how historians can use art, Beauty in the City will enrich such fields as urban history, art history, the history of New York City, and America in the twentieth century. Robert Slayton has identified a group of artists who saw in the gritty details of city life real beauty and social meaning. Hasia R. Diner, author of Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way A century ago, the Ashcan painters created an art that was of, by, and for urban Americansin all their exhilarating pluralism. Robert Slayton analyzes and celebrates their accomplishment in a work that combines brilliant scholarship and a profound passion for his subject. To his great credit, he reveals the beauty already there. Michael Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 19141918 With great narrative skill and finely drawn characters, Robert Slayton paints a vivid picture of New York and the art world in the early twentieth century. He reminds us that these artists and the city they inhabited continue to influence our perspectiveabout class, about gender, about racea century later. This book is a wonderful, vibrant look at a forgotten part of our history. Terry Golway, author of Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics
In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters--Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop--placed their images of modern "new women." Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists. Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted through the gender ideology of the period. This is a work of skillful interdisciplinary scholarship, combining recent insights from feminist art history, gender studies, and social and cultural theory. Drawing on a range of visual and verbal representations as well as biographical and critical texts, Todd balances the historical context surrounding the painters with nuanced analyses of how each artist's image of womanhood contributed to the continual redefining of the "new woman's" relationships to men, family, work, feminism, and sexuality.
