Ashcan School

Ashcan School. A term retrospectively applied to a number of American painters (not a formal group) active in New York in the decade before the First World War in reference to their shared interest in subject-matter from everyday urban life; the term was first used in print in 1934 in a book entitled Art in America in Modern Times, edited by Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr. The painters embraced by the term were inspired largely by Robert Henri (one of whose dictums was that ‘Art cannot be separated from life') and the four central figures—Glackens, Luks, Shinn, and Sloan—were all members of The Eight, a short-lived group founded by Henri in 1908. (The two terms are often confused, but ‘The Eight’ has a precise meaning, whereas ‘Ashcan School’ is a broader and vaguer notion; there is overlap between them, but some of the members of The Eight did not paint Ashcan-type subjects.) Before settling in New York (between 1896 and 1904) the four central Ashcan artists had all been artist-reporters on the Philadelphia Press. At a time when the camera was little used in newspaper work, the job of making rapid sketches on the spot for subsequent publication demanded a quick eye and and a rapid hand, and encouraged an interest in scenes of everyday life. However, in style and technique the artists of the Ashcan School are now seen to have differed less from contemporary academic painting than they themselves believed. Although they often painted slum life and outcasts and were referred to as the ‘revolutionary black gang', they were interested more in the picturesque aspects of their subjects than in the social issues they raised; it was not until the 1930s that Social Realism became a major force in American art. Among the other painters who have been described as members of the Ashcan School are George Bellows, Glenn Coleman (1887–1932), Eugene Higgins (1874–1958), Edward Hopper, and Jerome Myers