Ashcan School

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Kuykendall
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Ashcan School ◽  
American Artists ◽  
George Bellows ◽  
Total Freedom

The Ashcan School was a group of American artists that began exhibiting together in the early 20th century and advocated for total freedom in style and subject matter. Also known as Urban Realists because of their focus on urban, public spaces including trains, streets and parks, restaurants and bars, and other spaces of popular entertainment, Ashcan members included Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, and George Bellows. "Ashcan" was initially a pejorative term applied to the group because they employed dark colors and painterly, unblended brushstrokes, which were thought to make their works appear dirty or unfinished. The Ashcan School was initially associated with a secessionist art group called The Eight, which also included postimpressionists Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson. The Eight rebelled against the National Academy of Design, the principal art school and host of prestigious juried exhibitions in New York, because they sought greater stylistic freedom and more control over their exhibition opportunities. Implicitly, the Ashcan painters also rebelled against The Ten, a group of American Impressionists, because they thought their predecessors’ works were too delicate in style and genteel in subject matter.

Davis, Stuart (1892–1964)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annika Marie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Street Life ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Urban Street ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ashcan School

Stuart Davis was a painter, printmaker, muralist, and arts activist who played a prominent role in the development of American modernism in the first half of the 20th century. Visually, he brought the formal and technical experimentation of the European avant-garde to depictions of the modernity of the American metropolis. As a prolific writer and powerful spokesman, Davis was a committed cultural advocate, working to explain and defend modern abstract art, promoting artists’ rights, and arguing for the democratization of culture and art’s formative impact on society. Davis’s early style relates to the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century brand of realism that combines a direct, spontaneous, journalistic naturalism with everyday scenes of urban street life. The turning point for the young Davis was the New York Armory Show of 1913. Through the exhibit Davis was exposed to Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dada. However, Davis’s embrace of the formal rigor of European abstraction did not lead him to purely non-objective painting. Maintaining that form and content were equally important, he argued that European modernism’s visual fragmentation, instability, and simultaneity provided the visual means by which to express contemporary American urban life.

scholarly journals The Church Club of New York Library

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-33
Author(s):  
Jacqueline H. Rider
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Church ◽  
Changing Society

Organized in 1887 by religious, financial, and social leaders in Manhattan, the Church Club of New York holds a library of some 1,500 volumes. It documents the religious roots and theological framework of New York’s financial elite, the birth of the Episcopal Church, and mainline American Protestantism’s reaction to the Social Gospel movement in the early 20th century. This essay discusses how titles illustrate the challenges these gentlemen confronted to their roles and their church’s identity in a rapidly changing society. Industrialization, modernization, immigration were all affecting their personal, professional, and spiritual lives.  It also reflects on how the collection as a whole mirrors the evolution of one sector of 20th century American culture.

scholarly journals Kryzys filozofii polityki

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 23-42
Author(s):  
Barbara Markowska
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Theoretical Consideration ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Operating Conditions ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Scholarly Pursuit

The purport of the article is a reflection on the operating conditions of the philosophy of politics, beginning with its crisis, as described by Leo Strauss in the early 20th century and continuing up to the latest proposals, which emerged at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. First, the author poses a question regarding the essence of this crisis; was it related to the scientific paradigm of the philosophy of politics applied hitherto or, rather, to the very subject matter of this scholarly pursuit, which is to say, to politics itself. A scientific discipline must be able to delineate its subject matter and if the latter undergoes an unexpected modification, the former suffers a crisis. Was this what happened to politics itself? What was the decisive factor which caused it to escape a theoretical consideration that ceased to be a systematic reflection, in short, ceased to be science, only to become philosophy again, whereby the author understands ‘philosophy’ as a level of reflection such as to allow itself to posit subliminal questions purely in order to set up the determinants for further thinking as to what science is, what politics is and what makes politics different from non-politics.

Gill, Eric (1882–1940)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy Bergstrom ◽  
Ruth Cribb
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Arts And Crafts Movement ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Working Relationship ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Religious Subject ◽  
Public Architecture

Eric Gill was a sculptor, typeface designer, printmaker and craftsman associated with the Arts and Crafts movement whose greatest influence was on the development of modern British sculpture in the early 20th century. As an advocate of hand-making in small workshops, he is considered one of the main proponents of the method of direct carving. Through his close working relationship with Jacob Epstein between 1910 and 1912, and receiving support from Roger Fry, Gill’s sculptures were received as representing modernity through direct carving, the simplification and flattening of line and form, and the use of British stones. Gill’s work as a typographer, letter cutter, wood engraver, and essayist also placed him at the heart of many modern movements in Britain during his lifetime, including the Society of Wood Engravers. As a writer and prolific sculptor for public architecture in the 1930s, he became prominent in the popular press. As a Catholic convert, his views and the religious subject matter of his art have complicated his status in the art historical canon. Since his death, his influence and importance have been predominately attributed to his letter cutting and typography.

Reich, Lilly (1885–1947)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Cesare
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Set Design ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe

Lilly Reich was a German-born designer who created interiors, displays, and exhibitions in the early to mid-20th century. She was active in the Deutscher Werkbund and in the Bauhaus, and was the first female architect to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996. Reich’s career as a female designer has been said by critic Beatriz Colomina to be an example of the collaborative nature of architecture in which women have often played an unspoken role. Reich was one of the few female designers to have played a leading role in the early 20th century, yet she has gained little academic renown. As is common for female designers of the time they are often known in relation to their work with more prominent male architects or designers; for Reich, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was both a personal and professional partner. Reich, who came from a wealthy manufacturing family, studied in 1908 at the Wiener Werkstätte and then in 1910 at the Höhere Fachschule für Dekorationskunst in Berlin. Like many women of the period she focused on textiles, needlework, and fashion as well as set design and display.

The Snapshots of A. Thomas Nelson: A Case Study in the Preservation of Early 20th-century Vernacular Albums

Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-193
Author(s):  
Stephanie Becker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Single Object ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Selection Of

Throughout the early 20th century, A. Thomas Nelson took snapshots while traveling the United States and Canada. His wife, Catherine Nelson, made a selection of these and placed them within eight photographic albums, later acquired by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Using one of these, “Snapshots from Travels in the United States and Canada (1904–1940),” as a case study, this article explores preservation practices for early 20th-century vernacular albums. While such albums are a valuable part of any collection, they present many complex preservation challenges due to the variety of materials contained within a single object. Critical questions about cataloging, digitizing, and rehousing methods guide decisions on how to stabilize the album's fragile condition and allow for access. This case study offers insight for collection managers and archivists who find themselves caring for similar snapshot albums.

Sickert, Walter (1860–1942)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Furness
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
New Age ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Pictorial Space ◽  
Edgar Degas ◽  
British Art

Walter Sickert is widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures in modern British art. He was instrumental in furthering acceptance of Impressionist art in Britain and in the progression of modern British painting during the pre-war period in his capacities as both a painter and a writer for periodicals such as New Age. Sickert’s works demonstrate an abiding interest in the surface of pictures and the essence of paint as a material. The painting Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford (1892) shows Sickert at the confluence of his two great influences. Inspired by the tutelage of Whistler, its thin washes of wet paint and a shallow pictorial space depict a theatrical subject matter much favored by Edgar Degas. A decade later, in early 20th-century London, Sickert found his place as the elder statesman amongst artists including Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman and Malcolm Drummond in the Camden Town Group and London Group. Through his teaching at, among others, the Westminster School of Art, he imparted his devotion to everyday, urban subjects and his dispassionate recording of visual fact to future generations of figurative artists including William Coldstream and David Bomberg.

Modern Negro Art

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marissa H. Baker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
American Art ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
New Negro ◽  
African American Art ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
American Artists ◽  
American Society ◽  
African American Artists

Modern Negro Art by James A. Porter (1905–1970) is a ground-breaking historical study of African American art from slavery to the early 20th century. The first major text of its kind following Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), it was the main source of information on African American artists until comparable historical surveys were published in the 1970s. The book presents an overview of artists’ biographies with analysis of the style and subject matter of their work. The chapter "The New Negro Movement" lays out Porter’s main argument against Locke’s well-established racialist position. Locke advocated for the development of a "Negro art’ that would counter negative stereotypes and present a more appealing image of the New Negro to American society. Countering Locke, Porter argued that seeking to "exploit the ‘racial concept’" limited the potential expression of African American artists. Instead he advocated for a treatment of African American art as already integral to the history of American art. Rejecting Locke’s emphasis on an African ancestral heritage, Porter demonstrated the historical development of African American art in North America from slavery to the early 20th century. His research and thorough attention to overlooked African American artists remain the book’s most vital contributions to the field of art history, and accounts for the book’s continuing impact.

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