When Jacob Riis (1849-1914) exposed the squalid conditions of New York's immigrant neighborhoods in How The Other Half Lives (1890), he set off a sea-change in American culture and politics. Indeed, the industrial revolution had profoundly altered the socio-economic landscape. Rather than being a country of independent yeoman farmers, America was rapidly turning into a transmogrified version of itself - a nation of production centers containing wealthy elites, small middle classes and large working underclasses. In much of New York, toil, tenements and tuberculosis were the order of the day. There was also the dispossessed. They slept in alleyways, begged for spare change and died - young and broken-hearted..
As more and more people were being ground down from working 12-14 hours a day, six days a week (including children - who worked a bit less), an enormous chasm came to exist between the grim realities of daily life for the masses and the world of art. Compared to the deplorable conditions of the average American worker, a significant number of American artists, who had taken their inspiration and technique from the French Impressionists, were turning out scenes wholly divorced from life as it was actually being lived by the majority. In Eleanor Holding A Shell (1902), American Impressionist artist Frank W. Benson (1862-1951) rendered a stunningly beautiful image of an angelic young girl holding a sea shell amid in what appears to be a perfect state of nature. Eleanor's clothes, which are off-white and slightly grey, contrast well with her lily-white skin. She is a perfect reflection of the Anglo-Saxon upper class - white, wealthy and inside a life of leisure.
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Robert Henri (1865-1929, Henri is pronounced hen-rye), a talented artist who honed his skills at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, had another view of the role of art. Along with several other up-and-coming Philadelphia-based artists, which included William Glackens (1870-1938) and John French Sloan (1871-1951), Henri became part of an art coterie called The Eight. Inspired by Riis and perhaps Stephen Crane, a young novelist who starkly depicted the mean streets of New York's ethnic neighborhoods in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), The Eight were determined to produce art reflective of the middle and lower classes - or what is known in popular, progressive and democratic terms as the people. This group of artists, who had witnessed the wretched lives of the non-Anglo immigrants in New York first-hand, formed the Ashcan School of Art. The name Ashcan was perfect. Rather than lofty-sounding, Ashcan connoted realism, and it attempted paint a far broader, collective picture of the nation.
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Over the next four decades, The Eight challenged elitist culture and produced some of the finest works of art in the era. In Snow In New York (1902 - pictured above), Henri did not render a scene of pristine white flakes overspreading a natural setting akin to the Garden of Eden. Instead, his New York street snow ranges in color from white, to dingy grey and black. It has been polluted by carriage traffic and the grease and grime of an industrial city - quite a contrast to the snow scenes of French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926).
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Ten years later, two significant Ashcan School works, McSorley's Bar and Italo-American Celebration, Washington Square by John French Sloan and William Glackens respectively, were completed. For much of the Anglo-Saxon elite, Italians were repugnant due to their Catholicism. As for the Irish, they were doubly despised by the Protestant upper class. They were not only Catholic but also considered to be vulgar consumers of alcohol - the very type that would visit McSorley's Bar. By celebrating immigrant culture in their works, Sloan and Glackens were making a powerful statement against the narrow-minded prejudices of the upper classes.
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In cartoons published for The Masses, a radical paper published by Max Eastman (1883-1969) in New York City, Sloan notably depicted African-Americans no differently than other characters. This was no small gesture of tolerance and good will. In 'liberal' New York, racism was rampant, and African-Americans were often maliciously stereotyped and caricatured. Many businesses practiced informal segregation despite state laws, and legislation prohibiting interracial marriage gained significant support among New York legislators in 1913. Fortunately, that bill was shelved.
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Hence, the Ashcan School combated prejudice by depicting their ideal of a wholly inclusive society. This was progress as progress ought to be defined.
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Wanted: An Ashcan School of Politics
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Elites have no place in the twenty-first century. By definition, they are intolerant and divisive. A culture of freedom, democracy and fairness is not only created by redesigning political structures but also by recasting culture along the lines of tolerance, diversity and inclusion. Randolph Bourne (1886-1918), a native of New Jersey who belonged to the same group of young intellectual critics of elitist culture, neatly captured the goal of his generation - and of all generations across time and space - in his essay "Trans-national America" (1916) saying, "All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community."
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Last year, the world began challenging elites from Sana'a (Yemen) to San Francisco in the spirit of the Ashcan School. While progress has been made, there is still much painting to be done in our unrelenting quest to create a world of harmonious, beloved communities.
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(Image: Robert Henri, Snow In New York (1902). To view the works of art discussed above, please click onto kleostimes.tumblr.com to the right and check postings for 5 February)
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Key Source
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Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917 (1959)
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J Roquen