Ashcan School – my daily art display

Fourteenth Street School of Artists

Part 2. Isabel Bishop

“…I hope my work is recognizable as being by a woman, though I certainly would never deliberately make it feminine in any way, in subject or treatment. But if I speak in a voice which is my own, it’s bound to be the voice of a woman…”

-Isabel Bishop

Isabel Bishop, 1959. Photo by Budd ( New York N.Y.). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The Ashcan School of painters was the artistic movement that depicted Urban Realism in America during the late 19th and early 20th century. A few decades later another group of American realist painters, who were also based in New York city, began to focus on everyday life in the city. For these artists, it was all about the bustling area which centred around 14th Street and Union Square in Lower Manhattan during the Depression era. They became known as the Fourteenth Street School of Artists. One of these artists was Isabel Bishop.

Female Head by Isabel Bishop

Isabel Bishop was the youngest of five children born on March 3rd 1902 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to John Renson Bishop and Anna Newbold Bishop. Her parents were descendants from East coast mercantile families but although they came from “old money” they were considered middle-class and often struggled financially. Isabel’s parents were both highly educated individuals. Her father was a Greek and Latin scholar and had a Ph.D in history. Her mother was a writer and an activist for women’s suffrage. The family frequently moved from town to town for financial reasons and to gain employment. Wherever they set up home, Isabel’s father, John, would find work at the local school where he often rose to become its principal and in some cases took ownership of the school.

Ice Cream Cones by Isabel Bishop

In 1887 the couple had their first children, twins, a boy and a girl, Mildred and Newbold and in 1890 another set of twins, once again a boy and a girl, was born, Remson and Anstice. This enlargement of the family caused financial hardship and her father had to continually look for better paying jobs. Isobel did not remember much about the two sets of twins as by the time she was born they were away at boarding school or college. According to Isabel her parents were very different in temperament. Her mother was a free spirit but very strong-willed and in her 1987 interview she recalls an incident that had repercussions on her father’s life:

“…It was hard on my father that she was strong. For one thing, in Detroit, Michigan, women were not supposed to be strong. She simply liked what she liked and that was it. One time she was asked to go down to the court and testify in some case. She went down, but she wouldn’t swear to be telling the truth. She was asked by the court why she wouldn’t and she said, “I don’t believe in God.” It was in the Detroit papers with the headline:

“SCHOOL PRINCIPAL’S WIFE DOESN’T BELIEVE IN GOD”

I really felt for my father. I mean, a school principal! His life was pretty impossible after that…”

Two Girls with a Book by Isabel Bishop

Although born in Cincinatti Isobel and her parents moved to Detroit a year after she was born. In 1914, when she was twelve years of age, Isabel was enrolled in Saturday morning life drawing classes at the John Wicker Art School in Detroit. From there, at the age of sixteen, and once she had graduated from High School, she left Detroit and went to New York. It was here that she enrolled at the School of Applied Design for Women, where she studied illustration. In 1920, aged eighteen, Isabel, wanting to enhance her artistic knowledge and skills, attended the Art Students League where her first tutor was Max Weber, whom she disliked and who gave her a hard time. Later she was tutored by Kenneth Hayes Miller, another artist associated with the Fourteenth Street School who couldn’t be more different than Weber. Other tutors were Guy Pène du Bois, Robert Henri and Frank Vincent DuMond.

Portrait of Isabel Bishop by Guy Pene du Bois (1924)

According to Helen Yglesias’ 1989 biography Isabel Bishop, although Weber treated Isabel harshly and she felt intimidated by Robert Henri, in Kenneth Hayes Miller she found a mentor who, in her words, was “intellectually stimulating, not stultifying, a fascinating person who presented all sorts of new possibilities, new points of view.”

Isabel Bishop’s 9 West 14th Street Studio (no longer extant) highlighted in red, 14th Street, north side, west from Fifth Avenue. June 11, 1933.

Another friend she made at the Art Students League was Reginald Marsh, who made fleeting visits to the classes at the Art Students League whilst she was student there and this friendship led to her being witness to the working-class life of the city. In 1926, she went to live at 9 West Fourteenth Street, which was a short distance from where Marsh lived and it was in this vicinity that she kept her studio that overlooked Union Square at Broadway and East Fourteenth Street and remained there until 1982. From the windows of her studio she was able to witness the daily activities in Union Square. Fourteenth Street in the 20s and 30s was referred to as “The Poor Man’s Fifth Avenue.” It was a bustling center for bargain shopping and bawdy entertainment in the form of burlesque shows and movie theatres for everyday working-class New Yorkers.

Still Life with Orange #1 by Isabel Bishop

Her friendship with fellow student, Reginald Marsh, encompassed many lunch or dinner dates when they discussed their day’s work. She affectionately recalled that they each paid for their own fifty cent meal and occasionally Marsh would take her to a Coney Island dance marathon or backstage at Minsky’s Burlesque. She recalled that it was great going with Reggie, and whilst there he would sketch the goings-on at the Burlesque show. She said that there were a number of occasions, the owner, Minsky bought Reggie’s work.

The Artist’s Table by Isabel Bishop

Isabel loved the area around Union Square and would regularly visit the Square itself, sketching for hours on end. She remembered those days saying:

“…I adored it. Drawing nourished my spirit; it was like eating. I got ideas there, for drawing is a way of finding out something, even though it might only be the discovery of a simple gesture…”

If she liked one of her sketches, she would turn it into an etching or make a painting from it. She soon became known for depicting urban life and was a leading member of the Fourteenth Street School of artists.

14th Street by Isabel Bishop

The Great Depression began in 1929 and nobody seemed to want to spend money buying the work of an unknown female artist, especially one who had not even had a solo show. Money was tight, people were losing their jobs and America had fallen into the grip of the worst depression in history and most Americans were worried about how they could survive the disaster that had befallen the nation. Isabel went from art gallery to art gallery hoping that they would accept her paintings but with little luck. It was a very depressing and frustrating time in Isabel’s life. A turning point came when Isabel met Alan Gruskin. Gruskin had hoped to become an artist, but while still a student realized that his talents were better suited to art administration than painting. On graduating from Harvard he worked at a New York gallery that specialized in the works of the Old Masters. He left there and returned home hoping to start a career as an author but that never came to fruition so he returned to Manhattan and, in 1932, opened the Midtown Galleries at 559 Fifth Avenue. He specialised in artwork by living American artists and in that year he staged a solo exhibition of Isabel’s paintings.

Dante and Virgil in Union Square by Isabel Bishop (1932)

Isabel Bishop’s paintings focused on the ordinary people of New York City, and in particular, those in her neighbourhood around Union Square and 14th Street. However, her 1932 painting entitled Dante and Virgil in Union Square was extraordinary with her inclusion of Dante, in the red cloak, and Virgil, with a laurel wreath on his head, which makes this work memorable. Isabel said she was motivated when she read the translation of Dante’s Inferno, the first part of Italian writer Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century narrative poem The Divine Comedy with its tales of life in the underworld. In her depiction, Isabel likened the hordes of poor souls that confronted Dante and Virgil in the various levels of hell with the hordes of human beings that daily passed through Union Square at rush hour. In the painting we see a crowd of people at Union Square, the equestrian statue of George Washington in the centre framed by the Union Square Savings Bank and other buildings in the background. It is a very busy scene a woman leading her child by the hand, pairs of women walking away from the crowd, and a number of working class men, portrayed in darker colours, facing into the Square seem completely unaware of the classical figures, who stand in the shadowed foreground of the sidewalk, as if embodying the evaluating gaze of another era.

At the Noon Hour by Isabel Bishop (1936)

In Ellen Wiley Todd 1993 book, The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street, she describes the New Woman of the 1920s and 1930s as:
“…being a moderate sort, who hoped to capitalize on new job possibilities and to make herself attractive with the mass-produced products of the clothing and cosmetics industry…”

Hearn’s Department Store-Fourteenth Street Shoppers by Isabel Bishop (1927)

The entrance to Hearn’s Department Store was right across the street from Isabel Bishop’s studio and she realised that it was the perfect place to find and observe this “New Woman.” Isabel Bishop’s Hearn’s Department Store—Fourteenth Street Shoppers was completed in 1927, the same year that she enrolled in Kenneth Hayes Miller’s mural painting class at the Art Students League. It depicts the city’s middle-class shoppers who are wearing the latest fashions and who visit the shops around Union Square in order to pick up the latest bargains.

Two Girls by Isabel Bishop (1935)

In 1935 Isabel completed her painting entitled Two Girls. It was yet another of her works which depicted young working women. In this painting we see a close-up of two smartly dressed figures seemingly engaged discussing the contents of a letter. Isabel used two models for this depiction and for this work she used Rose Riggens, a server at a restaurant where Isabel often had breakfast, and Riggens’ friend Anna Abbott. The work exudes both warmth and tranquillity which counters the dire economic circumstances of the Great Depression in the 1930s. This painting which took her twelve months to complete was one of Isobel Bishop’s most well-known works and was originally shown at the Midtown Galleries in New York. It is now part of the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Encounter by Isabel Bishop (1940)

In her 1940 painting entitled Encounter we witness an exchange occurring between a man and a woman though the circumstance of this meeting remains unclear. From many of her paintings we can deduce that Isabel was an insightful observer of everyday activities of young women who visited offices and stores in her neighbourhood. Her works present working women as vivacious subjects for the American Art Scene, which centred on the daily lives of the city’s population. At a time of great unemployment Isabel found it easy to employ young unemployed clerical workers to pose for her. In this work, she depicts a young woman and her boyfriend, with whom she is having a rather stormy romance. The painting can be seen in the St Louis Art Museum.

Tidying Up by Isabel Bishop (1941)

In her 1941 painting Tidying Up, we see a woman, perhaps a secretary or salesperson, using a pocket mirror to check her teeth for lipstick smudges. Isabel liked to depict working-class women during their idle moments away from their jobs. She spent more than a decade depicting secretaries, salesclerks, and blue-collar workers who lived and often worked in and around Union Square. She favoured subjects of women who were simply going about their everyday lives, eating, talking, putting on makeup, and taking off their coats. It was these mundane actions along with facial expressions that Isabel Bishop believed divulged the character and temperament of the people she portrayed. This painting is part of the Indianapolis Museum of Art collection.

Girl Reading by Isabel Bishop (1935)

Bishop remained on Union Square, where she kept a studio until the end of her life. The area around Fourteenth Street and Union Square remained foremost as the subject matter for her paintings. She received many awards during her life and she was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1940 later in 1941 she was elevated to full Academician. She received a Benjamin Franklin Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts in London and was also elected a Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944 and was the first woman to hold an executive position in the National Institute of Arts and Letters as vice-president. In 1979, she was awarded the Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award presented to her by President Jimmy Carter.

Self portrait by Isabel Bishop (1927)

Isabel Bishop died on February 19th 1988 two weeks before her eighty-sixth birthday.

Most of the information for this blog came from the following excellent websites:

The Art Story

incollect

Isabel Bishop

Hellenica World

Off the Grid

Oral history interview with Isabel Bishop,
1987 November 12-December 11

Annex Galleries

Reading and Art

The Fourteenth Street School. Part 1.

When talking about American Urban Realism in art one thinks of The Ashcan School, which was an artistic movement in America during the late 19th and early 20th century. The name given to the group originated from a criticism written in the graphically pioneering American magazine of socialist politics, The Masses, in March 1916 by the cartoonist Art Young, who asserted that there were too many “pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts on Horatio Street.” The artists associated with this school of painting that produced works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, especially in the city’s poorer neighbourhoods, were Robert Henri, George Luks, William James Glackens, Everett Shinn, George Bellows and John Sloan.

Today I want to look at another group of American realist painters who were also based in New York city and who also focused on everyday life in the city. For them it was all about the bustling area which centred around 14th Street and around Union Square in Lower Manhattan during the Depression era. During the 1920s and the 1930s, these artists continued the tradition established by the Ashcan School. They became known as the Fourteenth Street School of Artists. This group of painters were inspired by the legacy of the Ashcan School artists who depicted urban life and this new group established studios in the Fourteenth Street area and were inspired by the crowds that would daily swamp the nearby streets.

Reginald Marsh

Reginald Marsh sketching on 14th Street, New York, 1941.

The first of the artists of the Fourteenth Street School I am looking at is Reginald Marsh. He was born on March 14th, 1898, in an apartment in Paris above the Café du Dome. He was the second son born to American parents who were both artists. His father was Frederick Dana Marsh, who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he worked with artists preparing murals for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. He went to Paris where in 1895 he married Alice Randall, a fellow Chicago art student and miniature painter. Whilst living in Paris, the couple had two sons, James in 1896 and Reginald two years later. Reginald’s father was one of the earliest American painters to depict modern industrialisation in America. The family lived affluently due to Reginald’s paternal grandfather. James Marsh, who had made a fortune in the Chicago meat packing business.

Self Portrait by Reginald Marsh (1927)

Reginald Marsh’s family moved to America in 1900 and relocated to Nutley, New Jersey where they set up a studio/home at No. 16 The Enclosure, a street that had been established as an artists’ colony some decades earlier by the American painter Frank Fowler, who had once owned their house. This resulted in Reginald being immersed in the world of art and painters who nurtured his love of painting and sketching. It was not just that art could be a good outlet for the teenager but it helped him to socialise with others and as he was a somewhat introverted and often tongue-tied boy, and so this was a bonus.

Four Women by Reginald Marsh (1947)

In 1914, the family moved to New Rochelle, in New York State. The family went on to buy an estate in Woodstock, New York, where they spent most of their summers. Reginald Marsh attended various schools including the Riverview Military Academy in Poughkeepsie and the Lawrenceville Preparatory School in New Jersey. After graduating from high school he enrolled at the Yale School of Art, the art school of Yale University, where he made a name for himself as an illustrator and cartoonist for the Art School’s humour magazine, The Yale Record

Figures on the Beach by Reginald Marsh (1921)

After graduating from Yale in 1920, Marsh re-located to New York, where, in 1922, he enrolled for a short period at the Art Students League. It was while studying art at this establishment that he gained a great deal of experience in painting and drawing from his skilled tutors, especially Kenneth Hayes Miller, an American painter and printmaker. Whilst at the Art Student League he became friends with fellow artist, Betty Burroughs. Their relationship grew and twelve months later, the couple married and as Betty’s father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art he was able to introduce his son-in-law to important figures in the art world. Reginald Marsh was now the family’s breadwinner, and so he began painting seriously.

Burlesque by Reginald Marsh

Gaiety Burlesque by Reginald Marsh (1930)

Once Marsh had graduated from Yale School of Art he moved to New York in his search for employment as a freelance illustrator. His first opportunity came when the New York Daily News commissioned him to produce depictions of vaudeville and burlesque performers. Burlesque and vaudeville shows were at the height of their popularity and Marsh’s depictions of burlesque dancers, chorus girls and strippers. Although some people often criticised them for their raunchiness and vulgarity, others were delighted by the comedy and satire emanating from his portrayals. In Edward Laning’s 1973 book, The Sketchbooks of Reginald Marsh, he described burlesque as:

“… the theater of the common man; it expressed the humor, and fantasies of the poor, the old, and the ill-favored…”

Wonderland Circus, Sideshow Coney Island by Reginald Marsh (1930)

Coney Island by Reginald Marsh (1933)

Mrsh’s job as a staff artist for the New York Daily News gave him the opportunity to explore the underbelly of society: He would wander the streets of Lower Manhattan, and gain inspiration from the burlesque shows along Bowery Street, the storefront windows and advertisements, and the beaches of Coney Island. Marsh also captured the throngs of theatre goers at these shows or outside the theatres and side-shows.

Ten Cents a Dance by Reginald Marsh

Zeke Youngblood’s Dance Marathon by Reginald Marsh (1932)

And there was the ever-popular but brutal Dance Marathons !

The New Deal was formulated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration which came up with ideas on how to alleviate the suffering of those who had neither jobs nor any money to support themselves. For the artistic community, Roosevelt came up with a number of schemes such as the Public Works of Art Project, the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture and the Treasury Relief Art Project. The Federal Art Project (FAP), which was created in 1935 as part of the Work Progress Administration (WPA), was one which directly funded visual artists and provided posters for other agencies like the Social Security Administration and the National Park Service. The William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building in Washington DC, which is a complex of several historic buildings, one of which was originally called the New Post Office, was completed in 1934. It housed the headquarters of the Post Office Department. The Clinton Federal Building was one of the initial locations that integrated various New Deal artworks that were originally commissioned and displayed in federally constructed buildings by the Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1936, Reginald Marsh completed two murals for the interior of the building.

Sorting the Mail by Reginald Marsh (1936) This mural was for the Ariel Rios Federal Building, Washington, D.C.

In preparation for his mural, Sorting the Mail, Marsh completed a number of preliminary sketches of the railway mail service which was located under the old Penn Station in New York, as well as the New York post office department building. He observed the new and modern technology, talked to the postal workers and watched them unloading and sorting the mail. Marsh’s depiction conveys the feverish dynamism of the workers. We see swarthy-skinned muscular men lifting and lugging large bags of mail. The various skin tones of the men allude to it being a diverse workforce of differing nationalities

Unloading the Mail by Reginald Marsh (1936)

Marsh’s other mural Unloading the Mail was also completed in 1936. The depiction in this mural was all about the international movement of mail from country to country. Marsh visited the Cunard liner RMS Berengaria which had docked in New York harbour. The Cunard line vessel, as well as carrying passengers across the Atlantic, brought mail to America from Europe and further afield. He made many sketches of the ship itself but the mural depicts the activities that occurred in the harbour boat which was used to bring the mail from the liner ashore for distribution. To the left we can catch a glimpse of the Manhattan shoreline whilst to the right we can see the officers of the liner handing the sacks of mail to the crew of the harbour tender. At the bottom left of the painting we can see a man, seated, tallying the sacks of mail that had been offloaded from the liner.

The Bowery by Reginald Marsh (1930)

By 1930, Reginald Marsh’s career was well established and thanks to inheriting some money from his late grandfather was comfortably well-off. Despite his wealth Marsh began to focus his work on depicting those who were less fortunate. It was his poignant depictions of the poverty suffered by the lower classes during the Great Depression that featured in many of his works, such as his 1930 work entitled The Bowery. In this painting Marsh has depicted the plight of the people hit hard by being out of work and in some cases, homeless. The scene before us has been created using a brown palette. We see large groups of men, who had suffered financially due to the financial crash, loitering along Bowery Street underneath many neon signs advertising cheap hotel accommodation. Above and to the right we catch a glimpse of the Third Avenue overhead railway.

Why Not Use The L by Reginald Marsh (1930)

A fascinating painting with and equally fascinating title is Reginald Marsh’s 1930 work, Why Not Use the “L”. The “L”—or “el”, is an elevated train that rose above the city streets. The western end started at Eight Avenue and 14th Street, ran through Union Square to the opposite end of the line at Rockaway Parkway, Brooklyn. The painting depicts three people in the railway carriage during the Depression. The woman to the right looks out apprehensively whilst the man seems exhausted. A second women to the left seems oblivious to her surroundings as she reads the newspaper. There are a number of advertising posters attached to the wall of the carriage. Reginald Marsh had accurately copied the adverts into his sketch books and added them to his final work.

One such advert extols the joys of Buckwheat Pancakes while another asserts that this form of transport is the best, using the title of this painting:

“…The subway is fast—certainly! But the open Air Elevated gets you there quickly, too—and with more comfort. Why not use the “L”?…”

Bread Line – No One has Starved by Reginald Marsh (1932)

For my last offering of a Reginald Marsh work I am looking at his very poignant etching entitled Bread Line–No One Has Starved. He completed this in 1932, at the height of the Great American Depression. It depicts a line of destitute men as they stand waiting in resignation for some sort of public assistance. The men are crowded into the black and white depiction and there is little to differentiate them. It is a depiction that represents poverty in general rather than an individual’s poverty. Marsh favoured depictions of the poor and down-and-out people and dismissed depicting the affluent saying that well-bred people were no fun to paint.

The Bread Line – the stark reality. Bowery men in bread line at Fleischman’s Restaurant, N.Y.C. – Thursday 2^nd January 1908

By 1932, the unemployment figure in America had risen to unparalleled levels and President Herbert Hoover was forced to admit to a congressional committee that no one, not even the federal government, really knew how many people were unemployed. Nevertheless, President Hoover, who at the time was seeking re-election, insisted that the underlying conditions of the American economy were sound and that no one has starved, and this phrase was incorporated into the title of Marsh’s p[ainting.

Reginald Marsh at work (1954)

In the 1940s Reginald, Marsh became an important teacher at the Art Students League of New York, whilst carrying on his work as a magazine illustrator for well-known magazines such as Life, Fortune, and Esquire. Sadly for Marsh his style of art became less appreciated and this affected him. Shortly before his death, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Graphic Arts by the American Academy and the National Institute for Arts and Letters. His disillusionment at the lack of appreciation of his art at that time became apparent when he received the award and said that I am not a man of this century.

Reginald Marsh died from a heart attack in Dorset, Vermont, on July 3rd, 1954, aged 56.

As usual, a great deal of information came from various Wikipedia sites but most came from the excellent sites below:

ART CONTRARIAN
incollect
ART HISTORY
QUEST ROYAL FINE ARTS
INSIDE THE APPLE

Theresa Bernstein. Part 1.

The Early Years

Theresa Bernstein (1890 -2002)

My blog today is all about a remarkable woman, not just for her art but for her amazing longevity, dying just a few months short of her 112^th birthday. She is the American painter, Theresa Ferber Bernstein.

Two miniature cameos (possibly self-portraits) by Theresa Bernstein (1907)

Theresa was born on March 1^st 1890 in Krakow, a city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Poland. She was the only child of Isidore Bernstein and Anne Bernstein (née Ferber). Her father was a Jewish textile merchant and her mother was a woman of Central European culture and learning who was a talented pianist. In 1891 when Theresa was one year old the family left Krakow and emigrated to America and Philadelphia became Theresa’s first home.

Polish Church, Easter Morning by Theresa Bernstein (1916)

As a young child, Theresa loved to draw and paint and later, whilst at high school, received some art training. Bernstein graduated from the William D. Kelley School in Philadelphia in June 1907, at the age of 17. That same year, with her drawing of sprouting onions viewed through a green glass planter, she won a Board of Education scholarship to the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, now the Moore College of Art & Design,where she enrolled in the four-year Normal Art Course for training teachers. It was here that she studied under Elliott Daingerfield, Daniel Garber, Harriet Sartain, Henry B. Snell, and Samuel Murray. Her interest in art grew as she got older and she would attend some lectures at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Daniel Garber’s Studio by Theresa Bernstein (1910)

Whilst studying at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women Theresa produced a painting 1n 1910 entitled Daniel Garber’s Studio which is a pictorial memory of her time there.

Dance Hall by Theresa Bernstein (1911)

The students would be taken on painting trips by their tutors and one such outing with William Daingerfield in 1911 was a summer stay at Blowing Rock, North Carolina, where she painted the first of her jazz-inspired works, entitled Dance Hall.

Kindergarten Class by Theresa Bernstein (1914)

She graduated from the Philadelphia School of Design for Women in 1911. Theresa’s father’s business in Philadelphia had run into difficulties and so he along with his wife and daughter left the city and went to live in New York and that October Theresa began taking life and portraiture classes with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League. Besides her art education Theresa travelled on two occasions with her mother to Europe, where they visited relatives and visited a number of art galleries. She greatly admired the work of the European Expressionist artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Edvard Munch.

Colored Church, North Carolina by Theresa Bernstein (1911)

When back in New York, Theresa visited the Manhattan gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, the 291 Gallery, and in 1913 she attended the Armory Show which was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. Here she was able to view works by European modernists. She had mixed feelings about what she saw and later stated that she couldn’t warm up to cubes and triangles—they didn’t have enough life force.

The Little Merry-go-Round by Theresa Bernstein (1913)

However, in 1913, a breakthrough occurred for Theresa when the National Academy of Design chose her painting, Open-Air Show for its annual exhibition. The work then went on to the Carnegie Institute and the Art Institute of Chicago, where it attracted the attention of English collector John Lane, who purchased it and became an enthusiastic supporter of Theresa.

At the Movies by Theresa Bernstein (1913)

The American edition of the English magazine The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, was titled The International Studio. It had its own editorial staff, and the content was different from that of the English edition, although many articles from it were reprinted. It was published in New York by John Lane & Company. W. H. de B. Nelson, an intriguing figure in the early 20th-century American art scene, wrote in The International Studio praising Theresa Bernstein for her independence of her direction with regards to her art stating that it was an uncompromising offerings of this ambitious girl, commending her choice of subject matter–“democratic parks, unfashionable chapels, the five-cent subway.” He finished by saying that she was a woman painter who paints like a man. he was delighted by his comments.

Searchlights on the Hudson by Theresa Bernstein (1915)

One of her paintings exhibited at the Milch Galleries was Searchlights on the Hudson which she had completed in 1915. Theresa had remembered seeing the unusual and spectacular sight of the Hudson River being illuminated by searchlights as a method of detection of enemy boats and dirigibles.

Waiting Room- Employment Office by Theresa Bernstein (1917)

Theresa, from an early age, was very observant. She could leave a room and once outside accurately describe what had been inside and could even sketch what she had seen. This excellent memory was of great help to her when she completed a painting in 1917 entitled Waiting Room – Employment Office. Four years earlier, when she was thirteen years old, she had accompanied her mother to the employment office, where she was going to select a housemaid, Theresa remembered what the room in the office looked like and all the people waiting patiently to secure work. It is an emotive recollection of that visit.

Street Workers by Theresa Bernstein (1915)

The Ashcan School was an informal art group that operated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and included great artists such as Robert Henri, John Sloan, William James Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, George Bellows, Jerome Myers. This group was known for its works in the style of urban realism, which produced depictions of urban life of the lower-class New Yorkers, warts and all. Although Theresa was never a formal member of the Ashcan School, she shared with it an enthusiasm for “modern” subject matter, to which she added a profoundly meaningful take on the way she saw her subjects.

In the Elevated by Theresa Bernstein (1916)

She embraced urbanism and popular culture with great passion. Her depictions of urban life were varied and encompassed the like of the cinema, trolley buses and the elevated trains, and places where the lower and lower-middle classes would congregate in the summer such as Coney Island. Her 1916 painting entitled In the Elevated depicts a passenger car on the Ninth Avenue Elevated railway, which Bernstein took between her parents’ apartment on West 94th Street and her studio on West 55th Street. This work by Bernstein encapsulates the experience of modern city folk who are placed in close physical proximity and yet remain psychologically isolated from one another.

Third Class Carriage by Honoré Daumier (1858)

The work reminds me of one of my favourite paintings by Honoré Daumier’s entitled Third Class Carriage which he completed around 1858.

The Readers by Theresa Bernstein (1914)

The New York Public Library was built on Fifth Avenue, between 70th and 71st Streets, in 1877 to much funfare and excitement and the first book was borrowed within ten minutes of the grand opening. One of the regular visitors to this great institution was Theresa Bernstein who spent many happy hours there. Whilst in the library she not only read the many books on offer but took the time to secretly sketch on scraps of paper and backs of envelopes the gesticulations and expressions of those around her. It got to the point that she became such a frequent visitor and loved everything about it that she referred to it in her memoir as her “alma mater.”

Theresa’s 1914 painting The Readers, depicts the reading room of this newly opened library. We see five men seated on all sides of a banquette, in a pyramid shape at the centre of the composition. Their faces are softly lit by the glow of the reading lamp. It is fascinating to see that each of them has staked out the best spot in the reading room and settled in for the day. The three men facing us seem very content and totally absorbed with their books.

Graphite on paper study for The Readers by Theresa Bernstein (1914)

What is fascinating about this painting is the change of heart Theresa must have had between making the preliminary sketch for the work and how it finished up. Theresa had a major change of heart as to the people present, as in the sketch one of the figures seated on the banquette, on the right, was a woman in a feathered hat. But in the painting, Bernstein replaced her with a man. In the finished painting the only woman depicted is one who stands in the middle background, plainly dressed and deep in thought, her hand resting on her chin as she studies her book. It is possible that placing the solitary woman in the background of the painting, Bernstein may have been providing a symbolic commentary on gender inequality. The Central Library was one of the few public places where women were able to sit uninterrupted and in comfort for hours, whilst delving into the world of books.

William Meyerowitz

Theresa’s life changed in 1917 when William Meyerowitz knocked on the door of her studio…………………………………………….

to be continued.

William James Glackens

To look at the history of the Ashcan School one has to go back a step and look at a group of painters who became known as The Eight. These eight artists, with Robert Henri, acknowledged as the leader of the group, were Arthur B. Davies, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Maurice B. Prendergast, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan.

Ashcan School artists and friends at John French Sloan’s Philadelphia Studio, 1898

Luks, Sloan, Glackens, and Shinn worked as newspaper artist/reporters and illustrator-cartoonists and maybe because of this connection, the many paintings of these artists took on a journalistic quality. All eight artists utilised the crowded life found on the New York streets as the subject of their paintings. Their work depicted un-idealized views of life in a big city and focused on the bars and the clientele, dark grubby-coloured tenements, pool halls, and slums. This was the epitome of urban realism. Realism in art was described by Gustave Courbet in an open letter he wrote on December 25^th 1861, now referred to as his Realist Manifesto. He wrote:

“…To know in order to do, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my time, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter but a man as well; in short, to create living art – this is my goal…”

At the high point of their popularity these men were seen as confronting Academia which favoured the genteel tradition of “art for art’s sake, and which had dominated the American art establishment for many decades with works from likes of John Singer Sargent and Abbott Handerson Thayer.

However, on February 3rd, 1908, the MacBeth Galleries, New York, opened an exhibition featuring The Eight artists. It caught the attention of the American art world and although the show remained on view in New York for less than a fortnight, it was taken to several cities including Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia. These exhibitions were lauded as watershed exhibitions of 20th-century vanguard art. It was a triumph of “American” art.

The name “Ashcan School” was a derisive criticism of The Eight and their works of art, which appeared in an article in The Masses, an American magazine of socialist politics. The author of the article alleged that there were too many “pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts on Horatio Street” in their paintings. The group of artists were amused by the article and the group soon became known as the Ashcan School of painters. The Ashcan School of artists had also been known as “The Apostles of Ugliness”.

William Glackens by Robert Henri (1904)

A few blogs back I looked at the life of George Luks who was an American realist painter connected to the Ashcan School. Today I am looking at the life and paintings of one of his contemporaries who was also one of the Ashcan School of painters. He is William James Glackens. William Glackens was born in Philadelphia on March 3^rd 1870. He was the youngest of three children to Samuel Glackens, a cashier for the Pennsylvania Railroad and his wife Elizabeth Glackens. William’s siblings were an older sister, Ada and an older brother Louis who would later become a cartoonist and illustrator and work on early animation films.

East River Park by William Glackens (1902)

William attended the Central High School where one of his fellow students John Sloan, who would later become a member of The Eight. Glackens graduated from the Central High School in 1890. Throughout his school days Glackens loved to draw and paint and became a very accomplished artist and in November 1891, aged twenty-one, he and Sloan enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Glackens also worked as an artist reporter for many newspapers, starting at the Philadelphia Record. His task was to pictorially record news events and had to work to tight deadlines.

Christmas Shoppers by William Glackens (1912)

In October 1894, having completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Art, Glackens started a job as a staff artist/reporter for the Philadelphia Press and worked alongside fellow artists Sloan, Edward Davis, George Luks, and Everett Shinn. Around this time Glackens was introduced to Robert Henri by Sloan. Henri was an artist five years older than the pair. He had returned to study at the Academy for a second stint after spending time in Paris studying at the Académie Julian, under William-Adolphe Bouguereau, where he developed a love for Impressionism and later, he was admitted into the École des Beaux Arts. Besides befriending Glackens and Sloan two more aspiring artists, George Luks and Everitt Shinn joined the informal group which met at Henri’s apartment to discuss art, philosophy, culture and more, their meetings became known as the Charcoal Club because they would spend time using that medium to produce drawings from life. This informal group explored art genres not available at the Academy, such as nude figure drawing. They also became interested in the social philosophical writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Émile Zola, and Henry David Thoreau. Besides meeting to draw. paint and discuss philosophy, the group led a very sociable life during which alcohol played its part !

Figures in the Park, Paris by William Glackens (1895)

In 1895, Glackens, along with several other artists, including Robert Henri travelled to Europe so that they could learn more about European art. The first country they visited was Holland where Glackens scrutinised the work of the Dutch masters. From there he went on to the French capital where he and Henri rented a studio apartment for a year. For Glackens, staying in Paris, exposed him to the work of the great Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. His greatest influence was the work of Manet.

Lena (the artist’s daughter) Painting by William Glackens (1918)

Glackens returned to America in 1896 and moved to New York and spent time at Henri’s many social gatherings. Glackens took up employment at the New York Herald as a reporter and also worked as an illustrator for various magazines. These two lines of work provided him with a good steady income and over the next decade he produced more than a thousand illustrations. Although many were comedic in nature, in April 1898 the Spanish-American War broke out in Cuba and the McClure’s Magazine sent him there to collate the news and produce newsworthy illustrations. It was a difficult assignment and his living conditions were poor. On his return to New York, he was taken ill and it was discovered that he had contracted malaria which would return time and again during his life.

Hammerstein’s Roof Garden by William Glackens (1901)

In 1901 Glackens completed a painting entitled Hammerstein’s Roof Garden. Hammerstein’s Roof Garden was the official name of the fashionable semi-outdoor vaudeville venue that theatre magnate, Oscar Hammerstein I, built atop the Victoria Theatre and the neighbouring Theatre Republic. During summer months theatres were often closed due to the suffocating atmosphere inside the venues and so roof garden venues were very popular. The viewer is placed as if they are part of the audience and in front of us, we see a a colourfully dressed female tightrope walker as she tentatively navigates the rope which is strung across the stage. In the foreground we see the audience, some of which are unaccompanied females which was something that years ago would have been unheard of. The painting is now part of the Whitney Museum of American Art collection in New York.

The Artist’s Wife, Edith Dimock Glackens, in her Wedding Dress by William Glackens (1904)

William Glackens’ single status ended in 1904 when he married Edith Dimock. Edith, who was six years younger than William, came from a wealthy Hartford Connecticut family which made its fortune as silk merchants. Despite her family’s strong objections but she turned away from business as a career and instead set about becoming a professional artist. She left home and moved to New York City when, in her early twenties, she enrolled at the Art Students League where she studied with American Impressionist William Merritt Chase.

Sweat Shop Girls in the Country by Edith Dimock (c.1913)

She soon made a name for herself as a talented watercolourist depicting women and children of working- and middle-class backgrounds. Through his wife’s wealth, Glackens could concentrate on his art, and often Edith and later their daughters, Ira and Lenna became his models. His 1901 portrait of his wife is of a classical formal style. Set against a dark background, Edith is depicted wearing a black coat and hat with a long brown pleated skirt. As with many of his portraits Glackens wanted his subjects to be seen just as they were, warts and all, and refused to idealize his sitters. In this portrait Glackens has made no attempt to either make the depiction more modern or beautify the sitter.

Portrait of Edith Dimock Glackens by Robert Henri (c.1902)

His friend Robert Henri also painted a portrait of Edith around the same time which appears more idealized and certainly adds a touch of beauty to the depiction.

At Mouquin’s by William Glackens (1905)

Artists need to sell their work and to do this their work has to be shown at exhibitions. However it was not always easy for many artists to have their work accepted by exhibition juries and in 1907, Glackens and many of his contemporaries decided to take the matter into their own hands and split from the National Academy of Design who they felt, for some reason, stopped accepting their work The Eight, as they had come to be known, led by Robert Henri decided to host their own exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York City and an opening date for the event was set for February 3^rd 1908.

May Day in Central Park by William Glackens (1905)

Although part of the Ashcan School of Painters, Glackens preferred to use a lighter palette for his work, unlike the darker palette used by the others who liked to depict the darker and grittier side of life in the city. For Glackens depictions of family life whilst shopping or relaxing in the park were his favourite subjects for his paintings. Unlike his colleagues Glackens preferred to focus more on scenes of leisure and entertainment rather than concentrate on the misery of life in the slums of the Lower East Side.

The Green Car by William Glackens (1910)

The consequences of working as an artist/reporter for a number of Philadelphia and New York newspapers taught him to observe the smallest of details of a scene. In New York Glackens had a studio on Washington Square Park and it was from here he captured a scene for his 1910 painting entitled The Green Car. The painting depicts a green trolley car as it rounds the corner at the south side of the park and we see it is heading towards a lady who is standing by the snowy curb, waiting to alight. She is dressed smartly in a long coat, hat, and muff, she signals to the conductor of the trolley car. Our eyes move from the foreground and the green trolley car across the snow-covered grass, through the trees and finally alight on a row of three-storey brick tenement buildings.

Olympia by Manet (1863)

In 1910 Glackens produced what many believe is his homage to Édouard Manet’s Olympia with his painting entitled Nude with Apple.

Nude with Apple by William Glackens (1910)

It depicts a reclining nude holding an apple which she has taken from the nearby bowl on her right. To her left on the sofa there is a large hat and a pile of her discarded clothing including one blue shoe. She wears a black choker around her neck which harks back to the same accoutrement warn by Manet’s reclining nude, Olympia. Whereas Manet’s Olympia covered her pubic region with her hand, Glackens has modestly covered his model’s pubic region with a piece of discarded white lingerie. Glackens’ depiction is another of his typical realist genre. The model is ordinary. She could not be termed beautiful. The depiction alludes to her being simply one of Glackens’ models who has just arrived at his studio wearing a large flowery hat, a gown and blue shoes. She then hurriedly undressed, abandoning her clothes on the sofa. The scene seems to have been unscripted. And yet…..are we to think of the apple in her hand as symbolising Eve?

Breezy Day, Tugboats New York by William Glackens (1910)

Glackens extensive knowledge of European art and artistic trends in Europe led him to be commissioned by Albert Barnes, the American chemist, businessman, art collector, writer, and educator, in January 1912 to travel to Europe and buy paintings for him which would then become the foundation for the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia. Barnes was also a High School classmate of Glackens and gave him twenty thousand dollars to be used for purchasing paintings and Glackens returned with thirty-three works of art. That December Barnes himself travelled to Paris to buy more works of art.

Soda Fountain by William Glackens (1935)

On Feb. 17th, 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York. The Armory Show, as it came to be known, had a profound effect on American art. William Glackens helped to organize the American section of this ground-breaking exhibition but later reflected on how the American art was somewhat inferior to the European submissions. He voiced his opinion:

“…Everything worthwhile in our art is due to the influence of French art. We have not yet arrived at a national art […] I am afraid that the American section of this exhibition will seem very tame beside the foreign section. But there is a promise of renaissance in American art…”

William Glackens in his studio (c.1915)

Although he liked the modern and much more abstract European works Glackens maintained his love of painting scenes of everyday life and always remained a realist artist. During the inter-war years Glackens made a number of trips to Europe buying European works to enhance the Barnes collection. Glackens died of a cerebral haemorrhage on May 22nd 1938 while spending a weekend visiting fellow artist Charles Prendergast in Westport, Connecticut. He was 68.

George Benjamin Luks

The artist I am looking at today is an American who was mainly known for his social-realist paintings and illustration. Today’s painter supported several of his contemporaries in their philosophy of painting subjects which challenged the traditional approaches put forward at the time by the National Academy of Design and the established art circles in America. This art renegade is George Benjamin Luks and he became a leading figure in the New York art world in the early part of the 20th century.

Bear by George Luks (1904)

George Luks was born on August 13th, 1867, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Emil and Bertha Luks who were both amateur painters and both encouraged their son’s inherent artistic talent by providing him with his earliest artistic tutoring. When George was still a young child, the family moved some fifty miles south-east to Pottsville, a town in the heart of Pennsylvania’s coal region. It was here that his father, a physician, tried to help the coal-miners and their families and was a supporter of a group known as the ‘Molly Maguires’, a secret organization of Irish-Americans that tried to improve conditions for the area’s miners. As George grew up, he became aware of the poverty-stricken lives of the miners and their families. This early exposure to the hard lives of the mining community had an effect on Luks and his works of art which often depicted impoverished families in naturalistic surroundings.

Portrait of Miss Ruth Breslin by George Luks (1925)

George Luks’ earliest job was in vaudeville. He and his brother took part in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey vaudeville circuits while still in their teens. However, even as a teenager, he was determined to become a professional artist and so his vaudeville career ended. In 1884, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he was tutored by the painter, Thomas Anshutz, but his rebellious nature resisted the rigors of formal study, and he withdrew after a short stay.

London Bus Driver by George Luks (1889)

Luks then visited Europe and set about visiting Germany, England and France attending several of the city’s art schools. One such school was the Kunstacademie in Dusseldorf, but his stay there as a pupil did not last long for the same reason that he departed the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts – his dislike of the high standards and inflexibility of the rules of the establishment. This mindset would stay with him all his life. He then headed for Paris and London. Throughout his European sojourn he was greatly influenced by European painters such as Velazquez, Manet, Rembrandt but in particular the Dutch painter, Frans Hals.

The Little Madonna by George Luks (1907)

On his return to America in 1890 he began to earn money as a newspaper illustrator and in 1894 he started at the Philadelphia Press and Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, where he produced “at-the-scene sketches” which later became illustrations to go alongside the news stories. This was Luks’ forte as he was both a talented draftsman and had a meticulous eye for recording details of events.

Havana by George Luks (1896)

He and fellow illustrator at the Philadelphia Press newspaper, Everett Shin, moved into a one-room flat in the city. Whilst working at the newspaper Luks became friends with the artists John Sloan and William Glackens. These four painters and illustrators would have weekly get-togethers at the studio of Robert Henri, a renowned artist who was several years their senior, and who emboldened his younger friends to ponder over the necessity for a new style of painting. Henri’s vision was that this new artistic style would express the essentials of their own time and experiences and would counter the limitations imposed by the present conservative art establishment. Henri told his friends that they should be depicting scenes of ordinary life and discard the current trends of portraying life as a genteel existence. Robert Henri and his four new friends with their new ideas regarding the direction of American art, collectively became known as the Philadelphia Five.

In 1896, the Philadelphia Press sent Luks to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War as a newspaper correspondent/war artist. On his return to America, he re-located to New York and joined the newspaper, New York World, under publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Luks began at the newspaper employed to draw the comic strips, such as The Yellow Kid and Hogan’s Alley. It was during this period that Luks began to devote more time to hone his painting skills, and six years later, in 1902, he abandoned newspaper work to concentrate all his energies to painting.

Street Scene (Hester Street) by George Luks (1905)

One of his most famous paintings was his 1905 work entitled Street Scene (Hester Street). The setting is a push-cart market on Hester Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an area of the city which was packed with recent Jewish immigrants. From our viewpoint looking down the street we see a crowd of shoppers, both men and women and in the foreground we see children, milling around a toy pedlar, searching for bargains. Many art historians have judged the depiction to be a compassionate pictorial essay of Jewish life. We see the people in profile, and Luks has paid particular attention to skin colour and the physical features of the people in the crowd, while the subject matter relates to a series of caricatures of Jewish peddlers. It is a congested depiction and we only get small glimpse of the blue sky in the middle background. In the middle-ground we see the darkly oppressive inexpensive tenement blocks, in which were apartments that were so designed to house hundreds of these people, maximising the profits of the landlords.

Allen Street by George Luks (1905)

Another of George Luks’ 1905 Lower East Side paintings was entitled Allen Street. Between 1880 and 1920, more than twenty million immigrants came to America, making it the greatest period of mass migration in American history. At the time Luks painted these Lower East Side street scenes it was home to approximately half a million Jewish immigrants, who had fled economic hardship and political violence within the Russian Empire. At the time it was the most densely populated place on earth. Sadly, with this sudden influx of Jews into the area came a rise in nativism, the protection of the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants, and anti-semitism.

Luks had produced antisemitic caricatures, above is an example, for several publications during the 1890s, and the emphasis on racist stereotypes about Jewish physiognomy can be seen in the painting, Hester Street.

The Spielers by George Luks (1905)

Despite the hardship of life whilst living in the overcrowded tenement block Luks also wanted to depict a modicum of joy displayed by some of the younger residents. His 1905 painting entitled The Spielers (from the German word spielen – to play) was one of his favourites works and when, in 1907, he gave it to his dealer, William Macbeth to sell, he said he wanted $2000 for it. His dealer was dismayed at such a high price. When it was displayed at Luks’ 1910 solo exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, critics called it an artistic masterpiece. Luks sold it direct to a collector but it is not known whether he achieved his $2000. In an article in the New York Times Magazine on February 6^th, 1916, the art critic James Huneker praised the work in his article George Luks, Versatile Painter of Humanity wrote:

“…The east side is yet to boast its Dickens. And Dickens would have enjoyed the picture of the little tousled Irish girl with her red locks who dances with the pretty flaxen-haired German child, surely a baker’s daughter of Avenue B. Now you might suppose that this vivid art, this painting which has caught and retained the primal jolt and rhythm of the sketch, might be necessary rude and unscientific in technique. It is the reverse. This particular picture is full of delicious tonalities. The head of the blonde girl might be from an English eighteenth century masterpiece…”

This simple painting of two girls dancing together more than any other work by Luks, made his reputation.

The Wrestlers by George Luks (1905)

Some art critics had voiced an opinion on Luks’ figurative work saying that he was not good at depicting human anatomy. It is thought that Luks’ baulked at this sleight on his ability and in 1905 produced a complex painting of two nude wrestlers, so as to counteract their criticism. The painting is now housed in the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, which described the work:

“…The artist’s perspective was radical for the time. Luks’s composition effectively presses the viewer to the edge of the wrestling pit, thereby emphasizing the down-at-heels setting. The jarring vantage point also evokes the sweaty underbelly of modern urban life, a theme for which he and fellow members of the Ashcan School would become known. Luks’s scene of entangled human flesh under duress is reminiscent of the sporting scenes that fellow Philadelphian Thomas Eakins painted, in particular Eakins’s 1899 Wrestlers (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Whereas Eakins depicted a wrestling hold with the impassive eye of a painter rendering a studio model, Luks conveys the passion exuded by the heaving torsos. Eakins applied carefully blended strokes of pigment, building up solidly modelled forms after the manner of his studio training with the French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Luks, in contrast, enlivens his figures with energetic brushwork and thick impasto. Luks’s familiarity with the popular press, gained from his work for illustrated periodicals, may have inspired the sense of immediacy he suggested—brilliantly illuminated flesh is thrown into relief against the dark background as though caught in a reporter’s flashbulb. The opponent at the left also recalls the terrifying visages of the early-nineteenth-century Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s so-called Black Paintings (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), in which humans are transformed into ghouls. Luks portrays a distinctive type among the multitudes in New York City, in this case an aggressive athlete. Once again, his training as a newspaper illustrator likely honed his astute sensitivity to physiognomy, and here the thickly furrowed brow, devilish eyes, and flushed complexion suggest the bellicose personality befitting a pugnacious wrestler…”

Known originally as The Five, of which Luks became a member. Then it became collectively known as The Eight, which was made up of the original five members with the addition of Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast. Then The Eight eventually became known as the Ashcan School. . The name “Ashcan” was originally coined by critics of the movement to deride the surplus of refuse bins in the artists’ pictures and the perceived dirtiness of the subjects at large. Robert Henri, the leader of the movement and its spiritual father was blunt of what he wanted to achieve. He said he wanted art to be akin to journalism… he wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter. Many of this group’s works were rejected when submitted to exhibitions of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design and this motivated The Eight to form their own exhibiting group. Their exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York in January, 1908 was a significant event in the promotion of twentieth-century American art.

Feeding the Pigs by George Luks

Following the success of the New York exhibition John Sloan organized a traveling exhibition that brought their paintings to Chicago, Indianapolis, Toledo, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Bridgeport, and Newark. These travelling exhibitions had people talking the new realism that the Ashcan School represented. George Luk’s paintings Feeding the Pigs and Mammy Groody were seen as examples of this new ‘earthiness’ that many art lovers were not yet ready to accept. The Ashcan movement threw down the gauntlet and confronted the academic art institutions, and as a result, during the 1910s the authority of the National Academy of Design as a cultural authority began to wane. The Ashcan painters played a an essential role in developing the nation’s sense of what were to be considered suitable subjects for free artistic expression.

Gramercy Street by George Luks (1905)

As a member of The Eight, George Luks created works in vivid bravura manner that captured the spirited energy of the tenement districts of New York and their occupants. The American Art historian, Milton Brown wrote about George Luks’ works in his 1955 book, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression:

“…In his art and in his character, he symbolized the spirit of American dynamism; as aggressive as a tycoon, as brash and boastful as a ‘drummer’. . . he was a swashbuckler in paint. This was not, of course, the cultured tradition of American life; it was rather the expression of a cruder side of America, an echo of the frontier…”

Hannaford.s Cove by George Luks (1922)

George Luks is best known for his depictions of New York City life, but he also painted many landscapes.

Old Gristmill, The Berkshires by George Luks (1925)

There are several landscapes of the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts that follow the Impressionist tradition. One such work is his painting Old Gristmill, The Berkshires which he completed in 1925. However, Luks was far happier living a city life.

Foggy Night by George Luks (c.1925)

Luks’ painting Foggy Night which he completed around 1925 captures his urban vision during his many walks around the city. He was fascinated by what he saw. In this depiction of an overcast night in New York, there is an eerie stillness about the scene. We see a lone cab driver who has stopped his horse-drawn carriage on an otherwise empty bridge. In the distance we can just make out shadowy buildings and the spire of a church. The city has been overwhelmed by the misty atmosphere and darkened by the nocturnal setting.

Spring Morning Houston and Division Streets by George Luks (1922)

George Luks was married twice but had no children. He was as famous for his paintings as he was with his mood. He was said to be loud, boastful of his boxing prowess but a good-humoured man, and was a notoriously heavy drinker. On October 29th, 1933, he was found dead in a Manhattan doorway at 6th Avenue and 52nd Street, a casualty of a bar-room brawl. He was 66. Luks was buried at Fernwood Cemetery in Royersford, Pennsylvania. He was dressed in an 18th-century embroidered waistcoat, which was one of his most valued possessions. His death was reported in the New York Times and the reporter wrote:

“…His canvasses were invariably virile; his versatility was astonishing, and he painted as he lived, contemptuous of conventionalities, impatient with snobbishness and full of joy of life that so many of his paintings reflected…”

McSorley’s Bar by John Sloan

I have looked at many paintings which have featured inns and taverns but they have been mainly been depictions of rural scenes with peasants in the Netherlands and Flanders and were painted by the Dutch and Flemish painters centuries ago. Today, for a change, I am looking at a genre painting of a tavern scene but this is not really a tavern, more what we British would call a pub or Americans would term a bar or a saloon. The title of the painting is McSorley’s Bar and was painted by the American artist John French Sloan. Sloan was originally a member of a group of artists who had the strange collective name of The Eight and later he became a leading figure in the Ashcan School of realist artists. I have featured works by these artists in earlier blogs and if you enter either Ashcan School or Robert Henri or George Bellows into the “Search” function at the right of this blog it will give you a little bit of history about these artist groups.

John French Sloan was born in New York in 1871. His father James had had an interest in art, but as only as a hobby but he did encourage his children to draw and paint during their early years. Sloan’s father struggled to find gainful employment moving from one job to another without ever making a fortune. He married, Henrietta, a girl who had come from a much more financially prosperous family and who was a teacher. James Sloan suffered a mental breakdown when John was seventeen years of age and consequently was unable to work and the burden of supporting the family fell on to the shoulders of the seventeen year old John. For this reason, John Sloan had to leave school and find a job in order to bring in some money for the family.

Sloan was employed in a local bookstore as an assistant cashier. The job was not very taxing and the young man had time to read the books that were on sale at the emporium and also spend time studying the artistic prints that it also held. It was during this time that Sloan started to make pen and ink copies of some of the prints and the store owner liked them so much that he allowed Sloan to put them up for sale in the store. Two years later in 1890 Sloan moved on to work in a stationery store where he used to design calendars and greeting cards. Sloan had now found the joy of art and enrolled in an evening art class. Buoyed by his artistic successes he left the stationers and set himself up as a commercial artist but his well-intentioned venture failed and he took a job as an illustrator at the local newspaper offices of The Philadelphia Enquirer, later he would work for the rival newspaper, The Philadelphia Press. He continued his artistic tuition in the evenings by enrolling at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It was here he met and became friends with fellow artists such as William Glackens and Robert Henri who became Sloan’s mentor, sending him reproductions of works by the French Impressionists and the leading European Renaissance painters, for him to copy.

When Sloan was twenty-seven he was introduced to a young woman with a somewhat chequered history, Anna Maria Wall, known affectionately as Dolly. Sloan, who was very naive, very self-conscious and lacked the social graces which would gain him female companionship, met Anna at a brothel. Although she worked in a department store during the day, she supplemented her meagre income by working in a brothel at night. She needed the extra money to feed her other vice; she was also an alcoholic but despite all this he fell in love with her and they started, what one can imagine, was a “challenging” relationship.

Their relationship did prove difficult as Anna not only suffered the effects of excessive and prolonged alcohol intake, she suffered from alcohol-related mental problems and insecurity often believing Sloan was about to leave her. In 1906 Sloan sought medical advice and was advised that he needed to constantly support Anna and show how much he needed her. Between them they devised a plan by which Sloan would keep a dairy and in it he would write down each day how much he loved Anna and wanted to be with her and then leave the diary somewhere where she was bound to find it and surreptitiously read his journal entries and by doing so put her mind at rest. He wrote daily entries for seven years until 1913. Despite these problems, Sloan’s artistic work continued well and he was producing numerous oil paintings. In 1904 he moved to New York and went to live in Greenwich Village and although relying on money he received from his freelance work for The Philadelphia Press newspaper, he supplemented that with money he earned for his book and magazine illustrations. It was whilst living in New York, in 1912, that he painted today’s featured work McSorley’s Bar. He exhibited it at the 1913 Armory Show, an exhibition of modern art which had been organised by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. This turned out to be a landmark exhibition which opened the eyes of the New Yorkers to this new modern art and the likes of cubism, who up till then had been accustomed to realistic art. Sloan’s painting never sold and in fact remained unsold until 1932 when the Detroit Institute of Arts purchased it. This was the first painting by Sloan to be part of a museum collection and was probably one of his best.

This painting was very typical of works by John Sloan in which he liked to depict the energy and life during the early years of the twentieth century of New York City and its inhabitants. Sloan was a socialist and a member of the Socialist Party and had great empathy with the less well-off and their demanding and troubled existences. His paintings would show the city’s people in different places and situations on the city streets and occasionally, like today’s painting, he would depict people in interior settings, such as cafés or bars as they discussed among themselves their everyday existence.

The painting today shows the interior of McSorley’s Bar with its clientele standing at the bar. John Mc Sorley opened his Manhatten establishment on East Seventh Street in 1854 and during its existence in the nineteenth century, was an all-male bar. From around 1912 it became a regular haunt of John Sloan and his Ashcan School artists. The bar Sloan depicted was somewhat rough and inhospitable. It was always frequented by a great mix of people of various social classes and even today carpenters and mechanics rub shoulders with Wall Street brokers and local politicians. John Sloan completed five paintings of the interior of the bar between 1912 and 1930 and these certainly increased the popularity of the establishment. Today, McSorley’s bar draws visitors from around the world. Its fame as New York’s oldest bar assures its survival and a 1970 court order guarantees that women are as welcome as men! It’s a museum-like place. One can go there to drink a pint of ale and survey relics of a past era.

In 1943, Sloan’s wife, Dolly, died of coronary heart disease. The next year, Sloan married Helen Farr, who is responsible for most of the preservation of his works. Part of this was the diary he wrote between 1907 and 1913 for his first wife, Dolly, to read and which were lovingly collated and published in 1965. They gave a marvellous insight into Sloan’s life and his thoughts during those turbulent times.

On September 7, 1951 John Sloan died at the age of 80, of cancer in Hanover, New Hampshire. John French Sloan was a leading figure in the Ashcan School of realist painters and was somebody who embraced the principles of socialism and allowed his artistic genius to be used to benefit those fervently upheld values. His paintings sadly rarely sold during his lifetime and teaching at the Art Students’ League, of which he became its director in 1931, was his principal income.

To learn more about McSorley’s Bar why not go to their website:

http://www.mcsorleysnewyork.com/

The Art Student (Miss Josephine Nivison) by Robert Henri

The Art Student by Robert Henri (1906) — The Art Student (Miss Josephine Nivison) by Robert Henri (1906)

Robert Henri, a leading figure of the Ashcan School in art, was born Robert Henri Cozad in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1865. His father John Cozad was a real estate developer and founded the town of Cozaddale, Ohio and later when the family moved west, he founded the Dawson County town of Cozad in the state of Nebraska. Robert had one brother, also named John, and was a distant cousin of Mary Cassatt, the much admired artist and printmaker. In October 1882, Henri’s father became embroiled in a dispute with a rancher over the right to pasture cattle on land claimed by the family. When the dispute turned physical, Cozad shot Pearson fatally with a pistol. Cozad was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, but the mood of the town turned against him. He fled to Denver, Colorado, and the rest of the family followed shortly afterwards. In order to disassociate themselves from the scandal, family members changed their names. The father became known as Richard Henry Lee, and his sons posed as adopted children under the names Frank Southern and Robert Earl Henri. In 1883 the family moved again, first to New York City and then on to Atlantic City, New Jersey.

At the age of twenty-one, Robert began studying art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia under the tutelage of Robert Anschutz, the painter who also taught several well-known painters including Everett Shin, George Luks and George Bellows who along with Henri would become known as the Ashcan School. Two years later in 1888 Robert Henri travelled to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian and later he was admitted to École des Beaux Arts. It was during this time that he embraced Impressionism.

In 1891 he returned to America and settled down in Philadelphia and began teaching at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. He became friendly with a group of artists and newspaper illustrators and they, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shin and John French Sloan, became known in artistic circles as the Philadelphia Four. In 1898 he married Linda Craige who was a student attending one of his private art classes, and they set off on a two-year long honeymoon/vacation in France.

In 1902 he started teaching at the New York School of Art and many “soon to be famous” artists were taught by him, including Joseph Stella, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, Louis Fancher, Stuart Davis and Norman Raeburn. Sadly in 1905 after a long period of poor health his wife Linda died.

A year later in 1906 Robert Henri was elected to the National Academy of Design which would later be known as The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts but his tenure at this establishment was short lived for when works of art by his painter friends were rejected for the Academy’s 1907 exhibition, he resigned labelling the Academy as a “cemetery of art” and threatened to stage his own art exhibition.

He carried out his threat the next year, 1908, when he and his friends staged a landmark exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York entitled The Eight after the eight artists who displayed their works). Besides his own works and those of the Philadelphia Four who had moved from Philadelphia to be with Henri, the other exhibitors were Maurice Prendegast, Ernest Lawson and Arthur B Davies. The exhibition was a sensation and these painters would soon become associated with the Ashcan School, which was a realist artistic movement and was best known for its portrayal scenes of daily life in the city of New York. The name “Ashcan” was first used to describe the artistic movement some years later by the American cartoonist and writer, Art Young.

In May 1908 Henri married for a second time, this time to Marjorie Organ a twenty-two year old Irish immigrant. Henri continued to paint and teach art in various establishments and when he was sixty-four he was chosen, by the Arts Council of New York, as one of the top three living American artists. A year later in 1929 Robert Henri died of cancer aged 65 and in 1931 the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a Memorial exhibition of his work to honour this giant of American Art.

My Daily Art Display for today is a work by Robert Henri called The Art Student (Miss Josephine Nivison) which he completed in 1906 and was one of the paintings I saw at the National Gallery this week at their small exhibition entitled An American Experiment. It is a life-sized oil on canvas painting (196cms x 98cms) and is quite dark. The model for the painting was Josephine Nivison who studied with Robert Henri at the New York School of Art the previous year. After Henri befriended her, she and some other students from his class travelled with him to Europe. Miss Nivison later married another influential painter, Edward Hopper (see my blog Nighthawks on Jan 23^rd) and she helped promote his work and acted as his model.

In the picture her body is undefined due to the all-encompassing heavy black artist’s smock she is wearing which reaches down to her feet. We are just able to glimpse the white collar and the red patterned shoulder of her dress she wears under the smock. Against a plain brown background, she clutches hold of her paintbrushes in her left hand as she looks out at us with a very determined expression.

This painting was one of only a few Robert Henri painted in 1906, the year after his wife’s death.