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Book Reviews
Up Close and Impersonal: Ashcan Art, City Life, and Democratic Politics
| ZURIER, REBECCA. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. x + 407 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-22018-8.
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The reputation of the American painters collectively known as the Ashcan School fluctuates with shifts in art-historical judgment between aesthetic and social criteria. The present dominance of cultural studies methodologies among American art historians is propitious for these artists, whose overarching subject was the diversity of populations and experience in the industrial city of immigrants at the turn of the previous century. Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, George Luks, George Bellows, and John Sloan may never have applied the epithet "Ashcan" to their aesthetic—that was the work of a later critic—yet as a badge of authenticity it has an undoubted cachet. William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff's recent compendium, New York Modern, casts these artists as a heroic modern alternative to the formalist currents of European modernism.1 |
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Rebecca Zurier is a rather more judicious guide to these six painters, one who does not let her admiration for their urban vision blind her to its limits. She is amply prepared for this undertaking by her previous work, which includes Art for "The Masses," a study of the graphic art selected by Sloan for that landmark magazine of the American left, and Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, a catalog she co-authored for an exhibition she co-curated. Picturing the City expands the treatment of themes introduced in her catalog essays. The opening suite of three chapters situates the artists in their cultural and visual milieu; a wealth of visual and verbal texts add texture to a cultural history of New York that draws on the work of Neil Harris, William Leach, Kathy Peiss, Christine Stansell, and William R. Taylor. The second section, "The Artists," presents five of the artists in four chapters, pairing Luks with Bellows. "The Storyteller's Vision," a chapter-length section devoted to Sloan, closes the study. |
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These six artists did not picture the city by producing iconic or cartographic images of a unified urban entity. That project better describes the work of their contemporaries, the City Beautiful planners and tonalist and impressionist painters. Ashcan work is resolutely local; scenes from a particular class or ethnic quarter often are specified down to the intersection, for example Thompson and Bleeker Streets; Sixth Avenue and 30th Street; Election Night, Herald Square, 1907. Most of these painters began their careers as newspaper illustrators in the days before news photography. When they turned to painting, their focus remained on passing scenes of public life and private moments on public view. Their characteristic painterly styles featured a "sketch-like handling of paint" (11) and a lack of finish that gives the impression of something fleetingly captured. |
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Zurier does a splendid job of presenting the formal characteristics of these paintings, but her true subject is the vision that informed them. As invoked in the subtitle, "urban vision" signifies at least three things: what the artists chose to see and to make their subjects; how they imagined their relation to the spectacle they beheld and the citizens they moved among; and the very activity of looking within a city increasingly organized as spectacle, in which glances and gazes could be a form of consumption but might also be political gestures that acknowledged or denied strangers' citizenly claims on the looker. |
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