Text d. Realism versus Modernism versus Tradition,

1900-1920

As early as the 1890s, the critic Hamlin Garland began calling for a means of expression that was American in subject matter and style and not based on European traditions. He also called for a rejection of the tradition of elegant and refined gentility in favor of themes from real life – even from the seamier side of life.

A new kind of painting in America also emerged, one that was not genteel, but drew its vitality from the life of the streets. It was truly American and largely free of European influences. Like the new literature, it was based in a vigorous new realism. The paintings meshed perfectly with the newfound interest in ordinary people, especially those of the working class, and often paralleled the new novels about the daily street life of urban America. With this social and literary background, the emergence of the Ashcan school was perhaps inevitable.

Realism, or the appearance of reality in the painted image, had long been the main tradition in American art, from Copley and Peale to Eakins and Homer, and so on into the twentieth century with artists such as John Sloan and Andrew Wyeth.

In their own form of rebellion against the Beaux-Arts style of painting of the late nineteenth century, the artists of the so-called Ashcan school revitalized the realist tradition in the decade or so before World War I. Their response to the modern world was to choose common street scenes and the bawdy life instead of lofty, rarefied themes from the mythology and literature of bygone times. Somewhat later, painters of the Regionalist schools, such as Thomas Hart Benton, John Stuart Curry, and Grant Wood, painted scenes of Midwestern life, again with new styles that broke with tradition.

The preference for naturalism in art in America, however, was challenged with the invasion of modernism in the second decade of the new century. No longer was the artist obligated to recreate the physical world – suddenly, the concept of abstraction of form, color, and light was taken up, at first among only a few artists, patrons, and critics, but then, in the 1920s and 1930s, with an outburst of the enthusiasm that characterizes spiritual conversion.

The history of American painting during the first four decades of the century therefore consists of two parallel traditions – realism and abstraction. The former seemed to arise naturally out of America itself, while the latter followed the lead of the dynamic European experiments in visual imagery.

Whichever tradition a painter belonged to, this was a period of new ways of seeing, new ways of painting, of fresh, new attitudes about art for art's sake. The group known as The Eight, most of whom were of the new realism, caused as much of an uproar when they held their first exhibition in 1908 as the modernists did when they had their exhibition at the Armory Show five years later. Both traditions, each in its own way, challenged an art establishment that had long been committed to a genteel art in the Beaux-Arts manner. Critics decried the vulgarization of art on the one hand, and the insanity and anarchy of modern art on the other.

The story of the realist tradition of this period begins with Robert Henri (1865-1929). Henri was raised in the Midwest, and studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, being instructed in the curriculum established by Thomas Eakins. A trip to Paris introduced Henri to the academic style of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but he soon turned to Impressionism as a preferred way of painting. However, Impressionism, too, soon seemed inadequate, and at that point Henri discovered the work of the great seventeenth-century realists Velazquez and Hals, as well as the more contemporary work of Manet and Whistler.

Returning to Philadelphia, Henri began to acquire a reputation as a painter and a teacher, especially among a group of young newspaper illustrators who gathered around him. This group included future members of The Eight – John Sloan, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, and George Luks. No small part of Henri's attraction was his defiance of the art establishments – his rebellion against what had become, he contended, a vapid Impressionism, and against the moribund academic approach of the Pennsylvania Academy and the National Academy.

In 1900, Robert Henri settled in New York City. His change of style is seen in West Fifty-seventh Street, New York (1902, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut) in which the light, pastel-hued palette of Impressionism has been replaced by the darker tones of Hals, Rembrandt, and Velazquez. The impressionist technique, too, has given way to a loose, painterly application in broad, rapid strokes.

Henri accepted city life for what it was – often drab and grimy, but always throbbing with vitality. For all its clutter, seediness, and filth, West Fifty-seventh Street is exemplary of the artistic legacy he would pass on to a generation of younger painters.

The realism and informality of Henri's style are seen in the portrait of his artist-friend George Luks (1904, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). Henri's representation of Luks attacked the traditional academic insistence on the gentility of art and its separation from real life. Its brusque, forthright reality appealed greatly to young men such as Sloan, Luks, Shinn, and Glackens, all of whom – as illustrators for newspapers – were more accustomed to depicting real life than romantic fantasy. In the portrait, a careless informality new to portraiture is created by Luks's cigarette, the disheveled old brown robe, and his rumpled hair. Henri's technique suggests the robust, slovenly character of his subject, making this portrait quite different from, say, Sargent's Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes.

Henri continued to be the mentor and rallying force around which younger, but equally rebellious, artists gathered. Sloan, Luks, Glackens, and Shinn followed him to New York from Philadelphia, and others such as Arthur B. Davies and Maurice Prendergast soon joined the group.

Henri advocated an artistic freedom, a search for one's personal means of expression and for truth in art. The Academy, on the other hand, sought beauty, but beauty that seemed unrelated to real life and therefore deprived of its vigor. Henri defended vulgarity and ugliness in art – because they are present in life, they are therefore legitimate in art. He opened his own school, where he instituted his innovative teaching methods.

When some of his young friends had their work rejected for the annual National Academy show in 1904, Henri, in a bold stroke, immediately organized a show of their own. It was, however, the 1908 exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City that brought about the group known as The Eight. The group comprised Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Lawson, Luks, Shinn, Davies, and Prendergast.

These men never coalesced into a unified school and never again exhibited together as The Eight – they practiced, in fact, widely divergent styles. But they were, at that moment, united in their angry defiance of the National Academy. Because of the subject matter in some of their pictures, representing the cluttered, shabby street scenes of the city, some members were later dubbed the Ashcan school. However, the terms «The Eight» and the «Ashcan school» cannot be used synonymously.

Critical reviews of the exhibition recognized the rebellious spirit and the new modes of painting that challenged the old guard of the National Academy. There was such interest in the show that it was sent on tour to Philadelphia and eight other cities.

Henri's organizational efforts continued with another show, the Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910, which brought additional pressure on the National Academy to liberalize its policies toward the younger artists and their work.

Henri's immediate followers were now free to paint the street people of the sidewalks of New York in an unromanticized realism that suited the subject matter. Tenement backyards were as acceptable as grand boulevards, and the neighborhood saloon was more interesting than the fashionable salon. Painting was free of academic restraints – free to respond to the urban environment in a way it never had before, in a manner that novelists such as Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, and Frank Norris had already done for a decade or more.

Henri urged John Sloan (1871-1951) to paint the life of Philadelphia, the city he knew so intimately. Sloan began his career as a staff artist for a newspaper and was familiar with the realities of the urban scene. His illustrations for The Inquirer and The Press bore the sensuous line of Art Nouveau and the decorative patterning of Japanese woodcuts that characterized the poster style of the 1890s. For a year Sloan studied at the Pennsylvania Academy under Thomas Anshutz, while he and his illustrator-friends met regularly at Henri's Philadelphia studio.

About the time he moved to New York City, following Henri there in 1904, Sloan was very interested in the technique of etching. One of his best known works is Fifth Avenue Critics, (1905, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware) a satirical indictment of a snobbish wealthy class.

Sloan's ideological inclinations were socialistic, and he was far more concerned with the masses than with the elite. While Sloan's work gradually gained favor and recognition, in the early years of his career he faced the outrage and denunciations encountered by any rebel who threatens the establishment.

Unlike his etchings, most of Sloan's paintings avoided satire to concentrate on an uncritical representation of some passing moment of everyday urban experience, as in The Wake of the Ferry II (1907, The Philips Collection, Washington. D.C.). The low-keyed tonality contributes to the all-pervading cheerlessness of the scene. In the shadowy figure at the right, one senses a disturbing isolation and loneliness within an overpopulated city. There is a freedom in the brushstrokes that suggests the spontaneity with which Sloan worked. If the picture seems uncomposed by academic standards, it is because Sloan was applying journalistic principles – observing a passing scene, reporting on the pastimes of humanity – without making humanity conform to the 'rules' of art.

William James Glackens (1870-1938), is a famous American painter, born in Philadelphia, and educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Starting his career as a newspaper and magazine illustrator, Glackens became a realistic painter of the group called The Eight. His dark-hued works marked a turning away from lofty academic subjects to scenes of everyday life. Later, as a result of his travels in France, Glackens's works became lighter, influenced by the impressionists, especially the French painter and sculptor Pierre Auguste Renoir. Glackens's best-known works include Luxembourg Gardens (1904, Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.), Washington Square (1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), and Promenade (1926, Detroit Institute of Arts).When the Society of Independent Artists was organized in 1917, Glackens was elected its first president.