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.

Afterword

The point of greatest interest is the place where land and water meet.Ralph Waldo Emerson11Kenneth White, On the Atlantic Edge: A Geopoetics Project (Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2006), 25.As Coastal Works so amply illustrates, we have never been so conscious of shores as we are today. Artists and writers were the first to colonize coasts in the nineteenth century, drawing in their wake the urban elites of Europe and America, followed by the middle and, ultimately, the working classes. Edges are where you will find artists, and, because islands are all edges, they fetch up there in great numbers. On Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, America’s most famous artist colony, painters jostle to set up their easels on the headlands made famous by three generations of Wyeths, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and so many others....