The Ashcan School was not an organized movement. The artists who worked in this style did not issue manifestos or even see themselves as a unified group with identical intentions or career goals. Some of the artists were politically minded, and others were apolitical. Their unity consisted of a desire to tell certain truths about the city and modern life they felt had been ignored by the suffocating influence of the Genteel Tradition in the visual arts.
Robert Henri, in some ways the spiritual father of this school, "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." He urged his younger friends and students to paint in the robust, unfettered, ungenteel spirit of his favorite poet,
Walt Whitman, and to be unafraid of offending contemporary taste. He believed that working-class and middle-class urban settings would provide better material for modern painters than drawing rooms and salons. Having been to Paris and admired the works of
Édouard Manet, Henri also urged his students to ‘’paint the everyday world in America just as it had been done in France.’’ By 1904, all of the artists relocated to New York. The name "Ashcan school" is a
tongue-in-cheek reference to other "schools of art". (For examples of other "schools of art" see
:Category:Italian art movements e.g.
Lucchese School and for instance
School of Paris.) Its origin is in a complaint found in a radical socialist publication called
The Masses in March 1916 by the cartoonist Art Young, alleging that there were too many "pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts on Horatio Street." That particular reference was published in
The Masses at a point at which the artists had already been working together for several years. They were amused by the reference and the name soon lost its negative connotations. The Ashcan School of artists had also been known as "The Apostles of Ugliness". The term Ashcan School was originally applied in derision. The school is not so much known for innovations in technique but more for its subject matter. Common subjects were prostitutes and street urchins. The work of the Ashcan painters links them to such documentary photographers as
Jacob Riis and
Lewis W. Hine. Several Ashcan School painters derived from the area of print publication at a time before photography replaced hand-drawn illustrations in newspapers. They were involved in journalistic pictorial reportage before concentrating their energies on painting.
George Luks once proclaimed "I can paint with a shoestring dipped in pitch and lard." In the mid-1890s Robert Henri returned to Philadelphia from Paris very unimpressed by the work of the
late Impressionists and with a determination to create a type of art that engaged with life. The first known use of the term "ash can art" is credited to artist
Art Young in 1916. The term by that time was applied to a large number of painters beyond the original "Philadelphia Five," including
George Bellows, Glenn O. Coleman,
Jerome Myers,
Gifford Beal, Eugene Higgins,
Carl Sprinchorn and
Edward Hopper. (Despite his inclusion in the group by some critics, Hopper rejected their focus and never embraced the label; his depictions of city streets were painted in a different spirit, "with not a single incidental ashcan in sight.") Photographers like
Jacob Riis and
Lewis Hine were also discussed as Ashcan artists. Like many art-historical terms, "Ashcan art" has sometimes been applied to so many different artists that its meaning has become diluted. The artists of the Ashcan School rebelled against both
American Impressionism and academic realism, the two most respected and commercially successful styles in the US at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast to the highly polished work of artists like
John Singer Sargent,
William Merritt Chase,
Kenyon Cox,
Thomas Wilmer Dewing, and
Abbott Thayer, Ashcan works were generally darker in tone and more roughly painted. Many captured the harsher moments of modern life, portraying street kids (e.g., Henri's
Willie Gee and Bellows'
Paddy Flannagan), prostitutes (e.g., Sloan's
The Haymarket and
Three A.M.), alcoholics (e.g., Luks'
The Old Duchess), indecorous animals (e.g., Luks'
Feeding the Pigs and
Woman with Goose), subways (e.g., Shinn's
Sixth Avenue Elevated After Midnight), crowded tenements (e.g., Bellows'
Cliff Dwellers), washing hung out to dry (Shinn's
The Laundress and Sloan's ''A Woman's Work''), boisterous theaters (e.g., Glackens' ''Hammerstein's Roof Garden'' and Shinn's
London Hippodrome), bloodied boxers (e.g., Bellows'
Both Members of This Club), and wrestlers on the mat (e.g., Luks'
The Wrestlers). It was their frequent, although not exclusive, focus upon poverty and the gritty realities of urban life that prompted some critics and curators to consider them too unsettling for mainstream audiences and collections. The advent of
modernism in the United States spelled the end of the Ashcan school's provocative reputation. With the
Armory Show of 1913 and the opening of more galleries in the 1910s promoting the work of
Cubists,
Fauves, and
Expressionists, Henri and his circle began to appear tame to a younger generation. Their rebellion was over not long after it began. It was the fate of the Ashcan realists to be seen by many art lovers as too radical in 1910 and, by many more, as old-fashioned by 1920. ==Connection to "The Eight"==