Davis, Stuart (1892–1964)

Stuart Davis was a painter, printmaker, muralist, and arts activist who played a prominent role in the development of American modernism in the first half of the 20th century. Visually, he brought the formal and technical experimentation of the European avant-garde to depictions of the modernity of the American metropolis. As a prolific writer and powerful spokesman, Davis was a committed cultural advocate, working to explain and defend modern abstract art, promoting artists’ rights, and arguing for the democratization of culture and art’s formative impact on society. Davis’s early style relates to the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century brand of realism that combines a direct, spontaneous, journalistic naturalism with everyday scenes of urban street life. The turning point for the young Davis was the New York Armory Show of 1913. Through the exhibit Davis was exposed to Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dada. However, Davis’s embrace of the formal rigor of European abstraction did not lead him to purely non-objective painting. Maintaining that form and content were equally important, he argued that European modernism’s visual fragmentation, instability, and simultaneity provided the visual means by which to express contemporary American urban life.

Ashcan School

The Ashcan School was a group of American artists that began exhibiting together in the early 20th century and advocated for total freedom in style and subject matter. Also known as Urban Realists because of their focus on urban, public spaces including trains, streets and parks, restaurants and bars, and other spaces of popular entertainment, Ashcan members included Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, and George Bellows. "Ashcan" was initially a pejorative term applied to the group because they employed dark colors and painterly, unblended brushstrokes, which were thought to make their works appear dirty or unfinished. The Ashcan School was initially associated with a secessionist art group called The Eight, which also included postimpressionists Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson. The Eight rebelled against the National Academy of Design, the principal art school and host of prestigious juried exhibitions in New York, because they sought greater stylistic freedom and more control over their exhibition opportunities. Implicitly, the Ashcan painters also rebelled against The Ten, a group of American Impressionists, because they thought their predecessors’ works were too delicate in style and genteel in subject matter.

Henri, Robert (1865–1929)

Robert Henri (born Robert Henry Cozad in Ohio) is best known as the leader of the Ashcan School, a group of Realist painters who portrayed New York City life in the first decades of the 20th century. His works ranged from tonalist landscapes, to full-length portraits of socialites and performers, to an extensive series of ordinary people from different cultures, many of them children. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886, Henri adopted a Realist style, which he honed in Paris at the Academie Julian. Back in Philadelphia, he taught at local art schools and in 1892 formed the Charcoal Club. This informal weekly discussion and sketching session included John Sloan and other local newspaper illustrators, who Henri encouraged to become painters of contemporary life. Henri studied the works of Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Frans Hals on several more European trips. In 1900 he settled in New York with his wife Linda Craige (ca. 1875–1905). Henri’s early works included small landscapes influenced by Whistlerian tonalism, such as La Neige (1899). He established his career, however, as a painter of large-scale figure paintings. He was invited to join the Society of American Artists and the National Academy of Design in 1903 and 1905, respectively.

The Problematic Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler, 1917–1927

This article examines the place of the past in Charles Sheeler's photographs and paintings made in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, around 1917, in New York City during the 1920s, and in the short film of New York, Manhatta (1921), which he made with the photographer Paul Strand. It situates these works in the context of the scholarship on Sheeler and on the art of New York in the early twentieth century, in particular that of the Ashcan School and of visual representation which attends to the architectural fabric of the city in preference to depicting its inhabitants. The article argues that although the scholarship has identified Sheeler's interest in making connections with the American past, it has not recognized the fraught nature of that relationship. By looking at the Doylestown and New York pictures, the analysis demonstrates how the problematic status of the past for Sheeler appears in these works as hauntings and absences.