William Glackens: Forgotten Father of American Modernism?

With a $20,000 check and instructions to bring back “some good paintings” from friend and financier Dr. Albert C. Barnes, American artist William Glackens set off for Paris in 1912 with carte blanche to buy the very best modern art he could find. Long a champion and connoisseur of European and American modernism, Glackens sent back to Barnes 33 works by now-renowned artists such as Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent Van Gogh that helped shape the collection that eventually became The Barnes Foundation. Glackens, however, was much more than a buyer. Glackens early on bought into the ideas of European modernism and interpreted them for an American idiom, as can be seen in a new exhibition at The Barnes Foundation. William Glackens, the first comprehensive survey of this undeservedly neglected artist in almost half a century, makes a powerful case for William Glackens as the forgotten father of American modernism. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "William Glackens: Forgotten Father of American Modernism?"

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.

Life and Death Struggle

Of all the “villains” in art history, Thomas Anshutz’s name rings with especially sinister tone for me for his betrayal of his mentor, Thomas Eakins. Born October 5, 1851, Anshutz helped orchestrate the 1886 dismissal of Eakins from his teaching position at the PAFA by handing over to school authorities nude photographs Anshutz had helped Eakins take. (Sidney Kirkpatrick’s The Revenge of Thomas Eakins argues the case against Anshutz in full.) In the undated charcoal drawing Two Male Figures Wrestling (above), Anshutz puts into practice the long hours he spent studying the male nude beside Eakins. In some ways it also illustrates the struggle between the two artists for supremacy. Anshutz stepped into Eakins position shortly after the dismissal and became one of the most accomplished teachers of the period, counting artists such as Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Charles Demuth, John Marin, and Charles Sheeler among his long list of students. Anshutz even eventually assumed the role of director of the PAFA as the disgraced Eakins left teaching entirely and languished in relative obscurity until his death. Eakins never spoke to Anshutz after his dismissal, perhaps knowing who and how he was betrayed but taking that secret to the grave rather than attack perhaps his finest student and harm his young family.

You can never argue with Anshutz’s talent. In a series of bravura portraits of young women in fancy dress, including A Rose (above, from 1907), Anshutz combined the technique he learned from Eakins with the softer, prettified style of John Singer Sargent that sold well at the time. In the expression of the young woman, looking pensively off into the distance, you can see an echo of the typical Eakins-esque psychological touch found so often in his portraits. That deep “mind-reading” often marred portraits for the sitters, but Anshutz avoids Eakins’ marketing error in rendering the fabric of the dress beautifully while keeping the woman’s eyes just intelligent enough to flatter but not enough to distract. In such pretty portraits Anshutz betrays much of Eakins’ philosophy, going for the easier, more marketable picture than something deeper. Perhaps Anshutz didn’t share Eakins’ intellectual depth, or maybe he was jealous that he could never match it.

I found myself recently flipping through a book on the Reconstruction period in America and found myself stunned by seeing the name "Anshutz" beside a work titled The Way They Live (above, from 1879) depicting the hard life of African-American sharecroppers after the abolition of slavery. Anshutz’s most famous work, 1880’s The Ironworkers’ Noontime, shows white American factory workers on break from their labors. Anshutz painted both works while still under Eakins’ wing, apparently trying to find the same socially relevant subjects that Eakins found in the worlds of sports and science. Looking at The Way They Live made me wonder at what could have been for Anshutz and Eakins if their relationship had played out differently. For most art history people, Anshutz remains a one-hit wonder for The Ironworkers’ Noontime notable for his instruction of a whole generation of American artists. For me, however, Anshutz remains an enigma—the greatest student of one of America’s greatest artists who put his career before his art and before the bond of friendship between himself and his mentor.

Wanna Get Away

Annie, Alex, and I will be packing up everything but the kitchen sink and heading down to an undisclosed location on the New Jersey Shore for some fun in the sun this week for a much needed and greatly deserved vacation. I can’t promise to kick it “old-school” like William Glackens’ Beach Umbrellas at Blue Point (above, from 1916), but there will be boardwalks and salt water taffy involved.

Art Blog By Bob will resume programming on Monday, August 18th. Until then, take this month’s beach-related poll, check out some of the great art blogs on the blogroll at right, or stroll through the archives and enjoy the memories.

Aloha!

Lifting Spirits

"Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you." Robert Henri’s words, as recorded by former student Margery Ryerson and published in The Art Spirit, continue to inspire art students and professional artists even today. When I interviewed Karl J. Kuerner, he quoted Henri more than his famous neighbor, Andrew Wyeth. Born June 24, 1865, Henri learned the classic realist technique at the PAFA and then Impressionism in Paris. By 1895, however, he disowned Impressionism in search of a style that spoke to him, arriving finally at a brand of romantic realism that became disparagingly and inaccurately known as the Ashcan School. Just one look at Henri’s Salome (above, from 1909), which shows a contemporary dancer in costume for the stage role, and you can see that Henri’s work was anything but down and dirty. Although some of his protégés—William Glackens, George Luks, and John Sloan—got gritty at times, Henri’s work exemplifies the elegance of a refined man with a common touch, who could find beauty in both Old Masters and young children playing in the street.

At the PAFA, Henri studied under Thomas Anshutz, the former assistant and (as we now know today) betrayer of Thomas Eakins. That connection gives Henri’s admiration for Eakins a whole new dimension. Eakins’ “iron will and his will to paint and to carry out his life as he thought it should go,” Henri wrote, “cost him heavily, but in his works we have the precious result of his independence, his generous heart and his big mind.” “’Integrity’ is the word which seems best to fit him,” Henri says of Eakins, adding that he considered Eakins “the greatest portrait painter America has produced.” In Henri’s portraits we see a similar integrity, yet with a freer style vastly different than that of Eakins. In The Irish Boy in Blue Denim (aka, Anthony Lavelle) (above, from 1927), Henri captures the innocence and freshness of the boy’s face, but in a style that not only harks back to his Impressionist days, but also seems influenced by all the other European modernist movements swirling around him. Henri always remained true to himself, but never failed to keep his eyes and his mind open to new experiences.

Henri the never-ending student made for one of the greatest art teachers in American art history. William Merritt Chase and Henri waged an unofficial “war” for the minds and hearts of American art students at the beginning of the twentieth century. It’s hard to declare a winner, but the track record of Henri’s greatest students—Glackens, Luks, Sloan, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and Stuart Davis, among others—speaks for itself. Henri’s painting The Art Student (above, from 1906), a portrait of Josephine Nivison, the future Mrs. Edward Hopper, shows the affection Henri had for all his students, to whom he taught the ways of life as much as the ways of art. "Art cannot be separated from life,” Henri told them. “It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience." Such sentiments ensure that Henri’s spirit will continue to live on in the hearts of artists and art lovers.

Yankee Ingenuity

As comfortable on a baseball diamond as he was in an art studio, Edmund Tarbell epitomized the spirit of the Ten American Painters group he helped found with Robert Henri and others. Born April 26, 1862, Tarbell’s Impressionist works such as In the Orchard (above, from 1891) seem out of place with the group later known as the Ashcan School. While William Glackens, John Sloan, and others depicted the grittier side of turn of the twentieth century America, Tarbell painted the more cultured circles he and his family inhabited, while still keeping his common touch. In the Orchard certainly gives an Impressionist feel, but it’s a feel felt second hand, perhaps through the works of Tarbell’s contemporary, John Singer Sargent, who knew several Impressionists personally and transmitted their style across the Atlantic when he came back to America in search of portrait commissions. Whereas French Impressionism distills a decidedly old tradition of landscape in a new mode, the Americanized Impressionism of Tarbell reflects the new American vocabulary of vigorous living, including the “New Woman,” whose freedom and vivacity are epitomized here in the person of Tarbell’s wife holding court at the center of the painting.


I find Tarbell interesting because of the way he could incorporate so many different elements into his art. Henri’s philosophy of painting what you know and love in the here and now certainly informs all of Tarbell’s painting, but the style in which he depicted that reality borrowed from many sources. Tarbell’s Impressionist works appeal to many, but he was versatile and talented enough to paint more photographically as well. New England Interior (above, from 1906) shows Tarbell’s love of Vermeer. You could almost mistake it for a Vermeer if not for the clothing and furniture. In Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (my review here), Ruth Bernard Yeazell shows how the idea of Vermeer and Dutch painting as a specific type of realism influenced novelist in the nineteenth century. I would argue that Tarbell combines the realism extolled by Henri with that proposed by Vermeer and arrives at a fascinating synthesis that is both contemporary and traditional.


We associate the Ashcan School mainly with the boxing paintings of Glackens or the street scenes of Sloan, but Tarbell offers a different strata of society in Preparing for the Matinee (above, from 1907). As with New England Interior, this painting shows the influence of Vermeer, but it also gives us a slice of the life of leisure and entertainment the Ashcan artists examined as so wonderfully presented in the Detroit Institute of Arts’ exhibition Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925 (my review here). As American society finally found time to have fun and enjoy the prosperity it had wrought, Tarbell and others captured not only the visuals of that transformation but the energy behind it. Tarbell’s Yankee ingenuity in bringing so many disparate elements of art to his personal vision of American life parallels the Yankee ingenuity that made his native New England and all of early twentieth-century America an exciting place to be.

Games People Play

McSorley’s Bar, John Sloan, 1912, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founder’s Society purchase.

“Had all the saloons been conducted with the dignity and decorum of McSorley’s, prohibition would never have come about,” John Sloan once said of his favorite watering hole and the subject of his famous painting, McSorley’s Bar (above). In the Detroit Institute of Arts’ current exhibition Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925, we see the Ashcan school at play, enjoying the pastimes of what Vincent DiGirolamo calls in the exhibition catalogue the “Age of Amusement.” “Their art allows us to trace the tumultuous origins of our own diverse, pleasure-obsessed consumer society,” DiGirolamo writes. In this exhibition, we turn away from the gritty urban realism more commonly associated with the Ashcan school and see an undervalued but highly relevant side of their art and the society they documented. “They celebrated the performance, the performer, or the audience through their canvases,” James W. Tottis, Associate Curator of American Art at the DIA and curator of the exhibition, sums up neatly in the catalogue.

Dempsey and Firpo, George Bellows, 1924, oil on canvas, 51 x 63 ¼ in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (31.95) Photograph copyright 1998.

Tottis traces the sticky label of the “Ashcan school” to an attack in 1916 in the socialist magazine The Masses directed at a specific drawing by George Bellows of scavenging hoboes titled “Disappointments of the Ashcan.” Although the Ashcan artists certainly depicted the reality of urban life, with all its inherent darkness, they also showed it’s lighter, fun side, which they saw as just as “true” to the existence they themselves enjoyed. Following the lead of Robert Henri, the Ashcan School not only painted what they knew and loved but went out of their way to live the “strenuous” American existence extolled by Theodore Roosevelt at that time. The Henri circle became, in Tottis’ phrase, a “counterculture fraternity,” enjoying baseball (Bellows was a college baseball star who nearly turned pro), boxing, and even brawling with the students of the mainstream Art Students’ League. The Ashcan artists were literally in the thick of the action, as seen in Bellows’ Dempsey and Firpo (above). When Luis Angel Firpo knocked Jack Dempsey through the ropes of the ring, the champ landed on Bellows, at least according to the artist. You can see Bellows cowering beneath the plummeting body of Dempsey in the painting. This exhibition of leisure images by the Ashcan artists contains many portraits of the artists themselves at the beach, in cafes, and otherwise enjoying the middle class entertainments they celebrate.

Chez Moquin, William Glackens, 1905, oil on canvas, 48 x 39 in. Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection, 1925.295.

“Leisure activities and entertainment offerings burgeoned with the decrease in hours in the workweek, the increasing accessibility and affordability of transportation, the advent of electrification, and a boom in entrepreneurial commercialization,” writes Valerie Ann Leeds in her essay, “Pictorial Pleasures: Leisure Themes and the Henri Circle.” The café life, a familiar subject of the French Impressionists, becomes a vital element of the life and art of the Ashcan artists. William Glackens' Chez Mouquin (above) shows a typical scene in which an older man (James B. Moore, owner of the rival Café Francis) enjoys the company of a young woman whom Moore would pass of as his “daughter” but was most likely one of the many “charity girls” who offered companionship (and possibly more) in exchange for gifts, a phenomenon Marianne Doezema examines in her essay “Representing Women.” Such scenes of people enjoying good times and good conversation follow DiGirolamo’s emphasis on the power of verbal communication during this period. “Hobnobbing in this milieu was not just about escaping the pressures of work,” DiGirolamo writes, “but also about engaging with the power of such ideas as anarchism, socialism, cubism, free love, and psychoanalysis.” The Henri Circle plunged headlong into the exchange of ideas as easily as into the waters off of Coney Island.

Polo at Lakewood, George Bellows, 1910, oil on canvas, 45 x 63 ½ in. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Columbus Art Association purchase.

Between the art of the Ashcan artists presented here and the accompanying catalogue essays, you come away with not only a new appreciation of the versatility of this group but also of the period in which they worked. The Bellows of the famous boxing paintings is also the Bellows of painted scenes of more refined pursuits as tennis and even polo (above). Nothing escaped the inquisitive, expansive eye of this group of artists committed to depicting every nuance of their surroundings, regardless of apparent class differences. “Their art conveys in precise, human terms such abstract historical processes as industrialization, immigration, and urbanization,” DiGirolama writes in the catalogue essay exemplifying the artists’ spirit best in presenting every stratum of early twentieth century society. DiGirolama explains how leisure became a societal issue as progressives promoted play as a necessary educational tool for children. To read that 132 daily and weekly newspapers were available in New York alone around 1900, 52 of which were in languages other than English, is to get a wholly different picture of a literate, worldly curious population grossly misrepresented by the stereotypical presentation of the Ashcan School.

Courtyard at Dusk, Robert Spencer, ca.1915, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 1/8 in., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The urban realism is, of course, still the main thrust of the Henri circle’s art, but this exhibition redefines what that realism entails. Robert Spencer’s Courtyard at Dusk (above) shows tenement dwellers beating the heat and escaping the drearier realities of their lives by gathering in a courtyard to enjoy some companionship. Works by Jerome Myers, whom Henri excluded from exhibitions for being too sentimental, appears here as clearly in tune with the Ashcan spirit. “My love was my witness in recording these earnest, simple lives,” Myers once said, “these visions of the slums clothed in dignity, never to me mere slums but the habitations of a people who were rich in spirit and effort.” As DiGirolama puts it succinctly, the Ashcan artists’ brush with leisure “does not make them hopeless romantics; to capture humor and joy is to apprehend genuine aspects of reality… civilization is as much about homo ludens (people at play) as about homo faber (people at work).” In engaging in the common life of people at play, the Ashcan artists at work not only helped record their era but helped shape American civilization as we know it today. To reclaim this aspect of their art is to reclaim a lost part of our heritage—the reasons why we play the games that we do as re-creation and not just distraction. Instead of “amusing ourselves to death,” as Neil Postman once put it, we need to look back through this exhibition to the days of the Ashcan artists and rediscover how to amuse ourselves back to life.

[Many thanks to the Detroit Institute of Arts for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925 and for the images from the exhibition.]

Out of the Ashes

When the age of the illustrated magazine was reaching its end in America, William Glackens and similar artists found themselves at a loss. Born March 13, 1870, Glackens joined the group of artists known as The Ashcan School or The Eight that met and centered around Robert Henri. Like Henri and John Sloan, Glackens moved to New York City in search of work and material. Almost as a swan song of the age of illustration, McClure’s Magazine sent Glackens to cover the Spanish-American War in 1898, when he drew Loading Horses on the Transports at Port Tampa (above, from 1898). (Could that actually be Teddy Roosevelt directing proceedings in the lower right corner?) Unlike Frederic Remington, who mythologized the war in the service of those stage managing it, Glackens casts a clear, realistic eye on the day to day activities of the troops, presaging the yen for realism he would soon bring back to New York City.

Just before leaving to cover the war, Glackens had returned from a trip to Paris with Henri to see the latest art movements there. Glackens found himself enthralled by the paintings of Manet, which brought a new kind of realism to French art. Glackens took the Zola–inspired realism of Manet and brought it back to America and the Ashcan School, which is, ironically, considered by many to be the quintessential “American” school of art. Glackens’ Chez Mouquin (above, from 1905) shows wealthy New Yorkers enjoying a night on the town, but they could easily be figures from the cafes of Paris as painted by Manet. If you saw these people reflected in the mirror of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, you wouldn’t even look twice. It seems fitting, however, that Glackens used the art of Paris to depict the life of New York City, just then beginning to become the great world city we now know it as.

Glackens’ Francophilia grew stronger and stronger, eventually expressing itself in a choppy style of painting with vibrant colors that approached Impressionism. March Day—Washington Square (above, from 1912) leaves the polish of Manet behind for the atmospheric effects of Pierre Auguste Renoir, who supplants Manet in Glackens’ heart. The Ashcan School is justifiably associated with the dark streets and alleys of New York, but Glackens brings that group out into the fresh air with a flair that is downright French. Glackens shared his love of Renoir with his old schoolmate Dr. Albert C. Barnes, purchasing works for Barnes before the good doctor began purchasing on his own, finally amassing the collection that became The Barnes Foundation. In the middle of Dr. Barnes’ grand collection of Renoir, Matisse, and others, the room dedicated to the work of William Glackens seems a strange home for an Ashcan artist until you allow yourself to look closely and realize the family resemblance.

Chameleon

Starting out as a gritty realist and morphing through or influencing almost every abstract genre of the twentieth century, Stuart Davis could easily serve as the Kevin Bacon of American art. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1894, Davis touches so many movements in six moves or less that his career is hard to encapsulate. With a mother who sculpted and a father who worked as a newspaper art director, Davis was literally born into the art world. Through his father, Davis met George Luks, William Glackens, and other artists. Davis followed these illustrators to New York and studied under under Robert Henri, eventually joining the Ashcan School, aka, The Eight. Like John Sloan, another Ashcan artist, Davis designed covers for The Masses, a Socialist periodical reflecting the populist goals of the group. All that changes, however, with the 1913 Armory Show, the introduction of modern art to America, which turned heads and turned Davis into the first American Cubist. Lucky Strike (above, from 1921) demonstrates the Synthetic rather than Analytical Cubism Davis employed, borrowing the shapes and colors of American cigarette advertising and leaving behind the brown studies of Picasso and Braque.

After a visit to Paris in 1928, Davis continued to establish himself as a modernist, although his cubism continued to evolve into other forms. It’s interesting to compare Davis with Gerald Murphy. (See Murphy’s paintings in a review I wrote here.) Murphy’s Razor (1924) and Watch (1925) come after Davis’ Lucky Strikes, but it’s hard to determine if Murphy knew Davis’ work. Whereas Davis encountered Picasso at the Armory Show, Murphy met Pablo over drinks. While Murphy abandoned painting in the 1920s, Davis continued to develop, painting works such as The Mellow Pad (above, from 1945-1951). Anything but mellow, The Mellow Pad strikes one today as an early Abstract Expressionist work minus the splatter. Davis’ love of jazz and improvisation comes through loud and clear in this work.

Davis lived through the age of Abstract Expression and even saw the dawn of Pop Art. Blips and Ifs (above, from 1963-1964), with its inclusion of words and bright colors, helps make the case for Davis as the father of Pop Art in America, a case that stretches all the way back to his Lucky Strikes in 1921. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Brillo Boxes lose a little of their originality in the wake of Davis’ work. While the other members of The Eight continued their realistic approach for the rest of their careers, Davis alone ventured out into the wider world of modernism and helped strike an American note.

The Immigrant Experience

Growing up in the coalmining town of Pottstown, Pennsylvania amidst Eastern European families such as his own, George Luks clearly understood the nature of the immigrant experience in early 20th century America. Although born himself in America, on August 13, 1867, Luks’ parents clearly impressed on him the hardships of coming to America and fitting in. Luks’ father, a physician, and the rest of the family did their best to help their fellow immigrants get by. In works such as In the Steerage (above), from 1900, Luks brings to life the feeling of second-class citizenship on the passage over the Atlantic in his empathetic representation of the passengers as well as the electricity and excitement surrounding the promise of a new life in his bold colors and brushwork.

Luks began his art career as an illustrator for The Philadelphia Press in 1894, his brash and braggadocious reputation already cemented by his early dropout from the PAFA and his (false) claims of once being a middleweight boxing champion. He soon met like-minded illustrators and artists such as John Sloan, William Glackens, and Robert Henri and followed them to New York City, where they formed the school known as The Eight or The Ashcan School. Works such as 1905’s Hester Street (above), which shows a burgeoning Eastern European Jewish community forming in New York City, soon won Luks critical success and lucrative sales.

Success spoiled Geoge Luks from a social consciousness perspective. The Spielers (above), also from 1905, represents the softer side of Luks, who loved painting children, such as this dancing pair, in the spirit of Frans Hals, one of his great influences. Luks soon turned to portraits of wealthy patrons, pushing his portrayals of the masses aside. Sadly, his alcoholism grew worse, costing him his marriage. In 1933, police found Luks’ dead body slumped in a speakeasy’s doorway, the remnant of a drunken bar fight the night before. The pretend champion of the world had lost his final bout. Luks work continues to stand out for its amazing amalgamation of old master and modernist technique as well as his empathetic presentation of the “yearning masses longing to be free.”

Freeing the Barnes Collection

Another great step towards freeing the collection at the Barnes Foundation, which has been held virtual hostage in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, since the days of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, was made with the announcement of a $5 million USD grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support scholarly activity at the Barnes Foundation as it makes its move to a new location in Philadelphia. (Georges Seurat’s Models, which shows the more famous A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte in the background and is in the Barnes collection, appears above.)

Art historians Martha Lucy, Kate Butler, and Claudine Grammont have already received access to the Barnes archives. Yve-Alain Bois and John House will be guiding their research.

One of my many frustrations with the Barnes Foundation (and there are many, such as the underappreciated role of William Glackens) has always been the lack of scholarly publications. I have their Great French Paintings from The Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-impressionist, and Early Modern, but that barely covers the depth and breadth of the collection. Opening the doors to scholars who can, for example, examine the connections Barnes saw between the work of El Greco, whom Barnes collected, and modern painters, can only draw more attention, scholarly and amateur, to the collection.

Freeing the paintings of the Barnes Foundation from the tomb Dr. Barnes confoundingly devised for them in so many ways will benefit everyone—Philadelphia culturally and economically, as well as the art history field in general.

William Glackens Turns 137

Happy Birthday to William Glackens, member of the Ashcan School and The Eight group of painters and graduate of the PAFA. (His painting Mahone Bay is above.) If you click through to the link on Glackens, it'll take you to the "Art 4 2 day" site that lists birthdays and deaths on this date. Read all the way to the end and you'll see a brief note that Glackens served as the agent and scout for Dr. Albert Barnes of the Barnes Foundation.

I've always been irked by the lack of recognition Glackens has received in the formation of the Barnes Foundation. Glackens was the real discoverer of Renoir for America, not Barnes. Glackens studied the works of Manet, Renoir, Degas, and other French Impressionists when they were actually cutting edge artists. Barnes provided the money to amass the collection, but the real visionary of the Barnes Foundation is William Glackens, at least in my mind. The Barnes Foundation in Lower Merion includes a room of Glackens' work, but too many people rush through to see all the Renoir and Matisse, unfortunately.

Perhaps one day William Glackens will be remembered as one of the pioneers of American Impressionism, but not soon enough for me.