Ashcan School

"[3] He urged his younger friends and students to paint in the robust, unfettered, ungenteel spirit of his favorite poet, Walt Whitman, and to be unafraid of offending contemporary taste.

Having been to Paris and admired the works of Édouard Manet, Henri also urged his students to ‘’paint the everyday world in America just as it had been done in France.’’[4] By 1904, all of the artists relocated to New York.

Its origin is in a complaint found in a radical socialist publication called The Masses in March 1916 by the cartoonist Art Young, alleging that there were too many "pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts on Horatio Street."

In the mid-1890s Robert Henri returned to Philadelphia from Paris very unimpressed by the work of the late Impressionists and with a determination to create a type of art that engaged with life.

[7] Many of the most famous Ashcan works were painted in the first decade of the century at the same time in which the realist fiction of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris was finding its audience and the muckraking journalists were calling attention to slum conditions.

[11] The term by that time was applied to a large number of painters beyond the original "Philadelphia Five," including George Bellows, Glenn O. Coleman, Jerome Myers, Gifford Beal, Eugene Higgins, Carl Sprinchorn and Edward Hopper.

(Despite his inclusion in the group by some critics, Hopper rejected their focus and never embraced the label; his depictions of city streets were painted in a different spirit, "with not a single incidental ashcan in sight.

Many captured the harsher moments of modern life, portraying street kids (e.g., Henri's Willie Gee and Bellows' Paddy Flannagan), prostitutes (e.g., Sloan's The Haymarket and Three A.M.), alcoholics (e.g., Luks' The Old Duchess), indecorous animals (e.g., Luks' Feeding the Pigs and Woman with Goose), subways (e.g., Shinn's Sixth Avenue Elevated After Midnight), crowded tenements (e.g., Bellows' Cliff Dwellers), washing hung out to dry (Shinn's The Laundress and Sloan's A Woman's Work), boisterous theaters (e.g., Glackens' Hammerstein's Roof Garden and Shinn's London Hippodrome), bloodied boxers (e.g., Bellows' Both Members of This Club), and wrestlers on the mat (e.g., Luks' The Wrestlers).

It was their frequent, although not exclusive, focus upon poverty and the gritty realities of urban life that prompted some critics and curators to consider them too unsettling for mainstream audiences and collections.

With the Armory Show of 1913 and the opening of more galleries in the 1910s promoting the work of Cubists, Fauves, and Expressionists, Henri and his circle began to appear tame to a younger generation.

When the exhibition closed in New York, where it attracted considerable attention, it toured Chicago, Toledo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Bridgeport, and Newark in a traveling show organized by John Sloan.