Cleaning the Slate

William Glackens, A Headache in Every Glass, 1903–1904, Charcoal and watercolor heightened with white gouache on cream wove paper, 13 1/4 x 19 1/2 in. (33.7 x 49.5 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.170

“We’ve come together because we’re so unlike,” wrote Robert Henri in a May 1907 press release for the Macbeth Galleries show in February 1908 that would forever link him and the other seven artists in that show as The Eight. Later, thanks to the socially conscious work of some of those artists, The Eight became known under the less-glamorous label of The Ashcan School. Certainly works such as William Glackens’ A Headache in Every Glass (above, 1903-1904) left a strong impression, creating new headaches for a group too diverse for any label beyond a simple number. For almost a century now, the label of Ashcan has been hard to rip away. In The Eight and American Modernisms, Elizabeth Kennedy of the Terra Foundation for American Art tries to pull The Eight from the ashes of art history and clean up not only their reputation but blow the dust off of the lasting effect those artists had on American Modern art in the years after the 1913 Armory Show that allegedly tolled the death knell for The Eight as an influential force for American art. If conventional art history etched a tombstone for The Eight, the years would read “1908-1913.” “This exaggeration of the rapid ascendancy and demise of The Eight’s contribution to a nascent American avant-garde obscures a far more complex tale,” Kennedy writes in her introductory essay, “for each artist experienced a successful professional journey that defies group labeling, with its implication of a single unifying ideology or a static artistic outlook.” The Eight and American Modernisms raises The Eight from the grave and confirms that reports of their early demise were greatly exaggerated.

Robert Henri, Figure in Motion, 1913, Oil on canvas, 77 1/4 x 37 1/4 in. (196.2 x 94.6 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.69

From the moment you look at the cover of The Eight and American Modernisms and behold Henri’s 1916 Betalo Nude, you know that this isn’t your father’s (or grandfather’s) idea of The Eight. The grime of gritty realism gives way to the symphony of tones and color in that nude, just one of the many nudes that The Eight painted during their heyday and long afterwards. As both artists and teachers, Henri and John Sloan were especially “dedicated to the representation of the human figure as the vehicle for portraying their expressive ideas,” writes Kennedy. Henri’s 1913 Figure in Motion (above), painted the same year that Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 wowed crowds at The Armory Show, responds to European Modernism without slavishly following it. “Experimental painting of the nude model in the studio was one of the theoretical strategies that some of The Eight continued late into their careers,” Kennedy explains, but never at the expense of losing their own personal vision. “It is necessary to pierce the core, to get at the value of a movement and not be confused by its sensation exterior,” Henri said of his reaction to new art movements. It is this “dedication to individualism in art, writing, and teaching” on Henri’s part that “fostered American modernism” argues Sarah Vure in her essay on Henri.

George Luks, Knitting for the Soldiers: High Bridge Park, c. 1918, Oil on canvas 30 3/16 x 36 1/8 in. (76.7 x 91.8 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.87

Kennedy and her cohorts do their best to individualize each of The Eight and allow them to stand alone rather than force them to stand together. Perhaps none of these individuals was so “individual” as George Luks. “Sometimes you wonder over his versatility,” a New York art critic wrote of Luks in 1920, “a character actor, a low comedian, even song-and-dance man, a poet, a profound sympathizer with human misery, and a human orchestra.” In her essay on Luks, Judith Hansen O’Toole links Luks with Henri, calling both “passionate humanitarians seeking to forge a new artistic expression that was truly American and of their own time.” Luks’ Knitting for the Soldiers: High Bridge Park (above, c. 1918) brings the World War I home front home while portraying “realism” with color and vibrant style. Such paintings by Luks, who resisted the “social realist” label for himself, laid the groundwork for the social commentators of the 1920s and 1930s. Luks painted portraits of coal miners not only because they struck him as interesting subjects, but because they reminded him of the miners he’d known during his childhood in Pennsylvania coal country. “Making art was their life,” Kennedy writes of The Eight in her introduction, “not merely the practice of their profession.” Luks lived and painted with passion and was found dead at 67 in the doorway of a speakeasy in 1933 after losing in a brawl. Each of the essayists in The Eight and American Modernisms beautifully breathes life into their subject and integrates living and painting to the point that they become one again.

Ernest Lawson, Brooklyn Bridge, 1917–20, Oil on canvas, 20 3/8 x 24 in. (51.8 x 61.0 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.43


After reading these essays, you come away with a sense of The Eight as a truly pivotal group in the trajectory of American art history—the link that connects the past with the future. Trained by American Impressionists John Twachtman and J. Alden Weir, Ernest Lawson brought Impressionism to the big city. Essayist Jochan Wierich sees Lawson as the heir to the American Romantic tradition of the Hudson River School as much as an heir of European Impressionists. “Lawson demonstrated to his contemporaries how the art of landscape could survive and refashion itself as an expression of modern life,” Wierich writes, in works such as Brooklyn Bridge (above, from 1917-1920), which “combine pastoral tradition with urban reality.” The grit and grime of the Ashcan School label disappears in such transcendent and transformative works. Lawson builds a bridge between Thomas Cole and Edward Hopper that continues a tradition without chaining any one artist to a single style. Both conservator and innovator of the American tradition in art, Lawson and the rest of The Eight retained the elusively definable “Americanism” of art without closing eyes to possibilities from abroad.

Maurice Prendergast, St. Malo, after 1907, Watercolor and graphite on paper, 15 1/8 x 22 in. (38.4 x 55.9 cm) Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.121

In her essay specifically on Maurice Prendergast, Kennedy uses the greatest exception to ideas of The Eight to “prove the rule” of their uncategorizable diversity. Prendergast stood as the “only member of The Eight whose reputation grew more favorable in [The Armory Show’s] immediate aftermath,” Kennedy explains. Suddenly, oddball works such as St. Malo (above, from after 1907) seemed not so odd in the context of Post-Impressionism. Sadly, it took the affirmation of artists from overseas to free viewers to accept Prendergast’s unusual style. The Eight and American Modernisms looks to free viewers to accept these artists as individuals and then, again, as a group of artists united in the same goal of furthering American art and contributing to American society in their own diverging ways. “The Eight’s simultaneous recognition of non-representational art as a valid expression of contemporary art styles while refusing to embrace the authority of abstract art as the only ‘true’ vehicle for modernity encouraged other American artists to insist on the integrity of their own creative ideas,” Kennedy concludes. In other words, The Eight accepted other artists on their own terms and asked for nothing less for themselves. The failure of that courtesy costs us a clear picture of how vital these artists and their philosophy was to the beginnings of modern art in America. The Eight and American Modernisms rescues The Eight from the ignoble dustbin of art history and washes away the smear of Ashcan School for good.


[Many thanks to The University of Chicago Press for providing me with a review copy of The Eight and American Modernisms and to the Terra Foundation for American Art for the images from the catalogue above.]

Personal Shopper

When Dr. Albert C. Barnes wanted to start the collection that eventually became The Barnes Foundation in 1910 he had more money than actual knowledge of art. Dr. Barnes resourcefully called upon his high school friend, the painter William Glackens, to buy the works that would become the foundation of the museum. Born March 13, 1870, Glackens was already a well-established illustrator and painter associated with the Ashcan School who had been to Paris many times and became quite familiar with the works of the Impressionists. Glackens’s May Day, Central Park (above, from 1905) shows how he imported to America not only the Impressionist painting technique but also the Impressionist fascination with the everyday life of regular people. May Day, Central Park captures turn of the century New Yorkers enjoying leisure in Central Park, which opened in 1859 in emulation of the green-friendly renovations by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann of Paris, France. One Impressionist especially obsessed with the Haussmannization of Paris was Glackens biggest influence (and biggest purchase on behalf of Barnes)— Renoir.

Glackens recognized the greatness of Renoir early on, buying works before the market rose. (Barnes himself would obsessively buy Renoirs for the rest of his life. Visiting The Barnes Foundation and its 181 works by Renoir today can give you a serious case of Renoir fatigue.) Glackens isn’t considered primarily an American Impressionist because of his association with Robert Henri, John Sloan, and other members of the Ashcan School, but Glackens appreciated the new dynamic of the Impressionists better than many others who simply mimicked the subject matter and brush stroke style. While others camped out on Monet’s doorstep, Glackens was painting works such as Nude with Apple (above, from 1909). Nude with Apple may not be as audacious as Edouard Manet's Olympia, which it alludes to, but for an American artist in 1909 it’s still pretty bold. Again, Glackens takes the French model and translates it into an American idiom, adding the apple to allude to this new “Eve” of the American “Eden,” where everything seemed so much fresher and newer than centuries-old Europe.

The Glackens room at The Barnes Foundation seems an anomaly after walking through rooms and rooms of Renoirs and other European masters. It stands as the simple acknowledgment to Glackens contribution of taste to the collection. For many critics, Glackens was too taken with Renoir, even to the point of losing the ability to put his own personality into his art. It is eerie how Glackens’ The Soda Fountain (above, from 1935) looks as if Renoir had traveled through time and space to drink a milkshake at an American corner drug store, circa 1935. However, I see Glackens as a great interpreter of the Impressionists, especially Renoir. Glackens saw beneath the brushstrokes and sunny day landscapes to the spirit and mind of the Impressionists. I like to think that if Manet or Renoir had been born in America in the late nineteenth century, they’d paint just like William Glackens.

Before the Footlights

When Everett Shinn traveled to France in the summer of 1900, he most likely saw Edgar Degas’ paintings of dancers from the 1870s and 1880s. Born November 6, 1876, Shinn the American took Degas’ French treatment of the theater and dance and translated it to the American idiom of the Ashcan School in works such as Dancer in White Before the Footlights (above, from 1910). A playwright and actor himself, Shinn felt himself drawn to the theater and made it his specialty (as Degas had done before) in the Ashcan School’s larger program of depicting the growing American urban populating both at work and at play. Because of the clear appeal of such works, Shinn enjoyed commercial success long before fellow Ashcan School artists such as Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Bellows. While his fellow Ashcan artists earned their reputation in depicting the darker, harsher side of urban life, the handsome and urbane Shinn cultivated a position in high society through these Degas-esque paintings.

Of course, Shinn still remained true to some degree to his roots as an illustrator. Working alongside Glackens and Sloan as newspaper illustrators, Shinn’s quick drafting skills and eye for arresting compositions soon made him a successful artist of everyday life in New York City. After witnessing the eviction of an old musician from his apartment on the Lower East Side, Shinn painted Eviction (Lower East Side) (above, from 1904). Pumping up the pathos, Shinn replaced the single old man with a whole family cast onto the streets. The family slumps onto a mattress in despair as passersby watch workers dump the family’s belongings beside them on the pavement. Jacob Riis’ photography, collected most notably in his 1890 work How the Other Half Lives, drew public attention to the deplorable living conditions many immigrants endured in their pursuit of the American dream. Despite such awareness and the first social policy changes aimed at alleviating the problem, squalor and crime continued to plague the poor in New York City decades later and demand the talents of Shinn and others to bring it to the public’s eye.


Today, scholars recall Shinn mainly as another member of the Ashcan school. Henri, Sloan, Glackens, and Bellows usually eclipse Shinn and his work. Shinn’s talent is undeniable, as seen in quick pastels such as his Self-Portrait (above, from 1901), but the balance of light and dark in his work skews too heavily towards the Degas-esque and not enough in the gritty direction we associate with his better known contemporaries. Shinn played to the taste of his time at the eventual expense of later obscurity when the public desired fewer pretty pictures and more depictions of harsh reality. Sadly, Shinn suffered through a series of broken marriages and financial ruin during the Great Depression before enjoying a brief renaissance of interest in his work in the 1930s until his death in 1953. Like his Ashcan cohorts, Shinn raised the field of illustration in America to the level of high art and helped usher in the age of American urban life as a subject worthy of the artistic spotlight.