A Walker in the ‘Ashcan' City

A Walker in the ‘Ashcan' City

The late distinguished critic Alfred Kazin (1915–98) recalls in The American Scholar (Spring 1998) when artists discovered his city—and he discovered them.

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The late distinguished critic Alfred Kazin (1915–98) recalls in The American Scholar (Spring 1998) when artists discovered his city—and he discovered them.

[excerpt]

For American artists in the first half of the century, New York itself was the great new subject. New York painters seemed to love the city more than New York writers did; the painters were tuned in to the passing show, where Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and later embittered leftwing realists like Michael Gold saw only victims and oppressors. I had no positive city images until I discovered them in art museums. At the old Whitney on Eighth Street, I found Reginald Marsh’s paintings of Fourteenth Street shoppers; at the Met, I found John Sloan’s neighborly Greenwich Village backyards with prowling cats and laundry drying on the line, and his full-figured secretaries in red hats just released from the office and rollicking under the curve that the Sixth Avenue El made at Thirtieth Street.

There was a certain haste to the painters whom the officially approved artists at the National Academy of Design derogatively called the Ashcan School. This reflected the timely discovery of New York as a subject. Many of the Ashcan paintings were humanly generous but broad in conception, too easy to take. George Bellows’s 1924 painting of Dempsey knocking Firpo out of the ring was as pleasant in its way as the Raphael Soyer paintings of meltingly lovable girls sitting around an employment agency. New York realists were more at home with sweating muscles than with the puzzle of existence. But I was glad that Henri, Glackens, Bellows, Luks, and Sloan were around—they gave color, the vibrant smack of life, to a New York that needed the recognition through art that writers and painters both withheld until the new century burst upon them.

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