Ashcan School

File:Stamp-ctc-ash-can-school.jpg

The Ash Can Painters were honored on a series of American commemorative stamps. This image: George Bellows' Stag at Sharkey's.

"The Eight" redirects here. For the novel by Katherine Neville, see The Eight (novel).

The Ash Can School, sometimes contracted as the Ashcan School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in poor urban neighborhoods. The movement is most associated with a group known as The Eight, or The Ash Can Painters, whose members were Robert Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, John French Sloan, and George Luks. The Eight exhibited as a group only once, at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908, but they are still remembered as a group, despite the fact that their work was very diverse in terms of style and subject matter.

Most of the work from Ashcan display common motifs:

• Gritty, urban scenes; finding beauty in the drab and ugly aspects of life
• Portrayal of urban vitality
• Capture the spontaneous moments in everyday life
• Illustrated the process of Americanism
• Rebelled against the sentimental storybook landscapes of the past era

As noted, the Ash Can School was not an organized group, but rather the term was applied later to a group of artists, including Henri, Glackens, Edward Hopper (a student of Henri), Shinn, Sloan, Luks, George Bellows (another student of Henri), Mabel Dwight, and others such as photographer Jacob Riis, who portrayed urban subject matter, also primarily of New York's poorer neighborhoods. It was this frequent, although not total, focus upon poverty and the daily realities of urban life at that time that prompted critics to consider them on the fringe of modern art. Everyday life in the city was dealt with, not only as art, but as a contemporary standard of beauty, rendered in the somber palette observed in the city.