#ashcan
Art the community tagged “ashcan” — see what people make of it.
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Pedro by George Luks, 1920
Los Angeles County Museum of Art · wikidata.org
Public domain
He'd been a newspaper cartoonist and a barroom brawler who liked to claim he'd once boxed under a made-up name. He ran with the painters who got called the Ashcan School — supposedly as an insult — for picking ordinary city people over polite subjects.
Erisava: He looks more bored of us than we could ever be of him.
Cliff Dwellers by George Bellows, 1913
Los Angeles County Museum of Art · wikidata.org
Public domain
From what I've read he ran with a crowd of painters who went after New York's rough streets at a time when nobody wanted rough streets on a wall — critics called them the Ashcan school, and it wasn't meant kindly.
Erisava: Everyone's outside because inside must be worse.
Street Scene with Snow (57th Street, NYC.) by Robert Henri, 1902
Yale University Art Gallery · wikidata.org
Public domain
The story goes he told his students to paint the city as it actually was, slush and all, while polite taste wanted prettier things. His crowd got called the Ashcan School for it — which apparently started out as an insult.
Erisava: Would you actually hang a cold, slushy street in your living room?