THE EPIC OF THE CITY

By ROBERT HUGHES

UNTIL ABOUT 1880, THE ACCEPTed epic subject of American painting was the Western frontier. By 1900 this had slid into nostalgia; it was no longer in synch with social reality. Most Americans lived in cities, and the myth of the West was just that: a myth, however durable. The real frontier was urban--a place of hitherto unimagined overcrowding, of cultural collision enforced by huge-scale immigration, of rapid change, where class ground against class like the imperfect rollers of a giant machine. Its epitome was New York City--Bagdad-on-the-Subway, as the writer O. Henry called it--a city in convulsive and continuous transition, bursting at the seams with high spirits, misery and spectacle.

The painters who reported on it were nicknamed the Ashcan School by a critic in the 1930s, and the label has stuck. They were Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens and George Bellows, and among them they created the first art of urban America. The current show at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, "Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York," is a fine introduction to their work.

The group had formed around Henri in Philadelphia. Henri's original family name was Cozad--he was a very distant relation of Mary Cassatt--but his father, a riverboat gambler and property shark, had shot a man in Nebraska and had moved East and changed his name to escape the judge and jury. Young Henri (pronounced Hen-rye) became an artist through study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which in the 1880s was still what its chief teacher, the great realist Thomas Eakins, had made it: the best place in America to learn direct, factual realist painting, based on incessant drawing of the naked body.

Henri made a pilgrimage to Paris in 1888 and absorbed a fairly academic style of Impressionism during three years of study there. But it was his second trip to Paris in the mid-1890s that confirmed his direction as an artist. Dissatisfied with Impressionism as an art of insubstantial surfaces, he immersed himself in dark tonal painting, based on Manet and Frans Hals. He wanted the image to be not a shimmer of light but a lump in the mind, given urgency by slashing brushstrokes and depth by strong contrast. He liked Hals' vulgarity and reflected it in his portraits, one of the most spectacular of which is in this show--Salome, 1909, a portrait of a dancer known as Mademoiselle Voclezca. Her long leg, thrust out with strutting sexual arrogance and glinting through the overbrushed black veil, had more oomph than a thousand of the virginal Muses and personifications of Columbia painted by academics like Kenyon Cox.

In Philadelphia, Henri's worldly, rebellious, effusive nature made him a magnet to younger artists, most of whom worked as illustrators for the Philadelphia press--Sloan, Glackens, Shinn and Luks. They drank together, had long poker sessions, bellowed poetry at one another and argued late into the night. Sloan recalled 50 years later that Henri was "a catalyst, an enthusiast ... with the pioneer's contempt for cant and aestheticism." Moreover, he was genuinely interested in the young, and was to inspire several generations of students--not only his younger contemporaries like Sloan and Bellows, but Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis, the Dadaist Man Ray and, strange to say, Leon Trotsky, who briefly studied art at the Ferrer School in New York when Henri was teaching there.

By 1904, Henri and the rest had moved to New York, where an unparalleled field of subjects for painter-journalists awaited them. The artist, they all believed, must connect to the harsh facts of his society, especially in the city; then his art would draw life and staying power from its common subject matter. "His vest is slightly spotted; he is real," said Sloan approvingly of a visiting Irish painter, J.B. Yeats, father of the poet. Luks boasted that he could paint with a shoestring dipped in lard and tar. The artist, smearing oily gunk on a cloth with bristles, is immersed in mess--a manual worker of images. This makes him one with the city and its people. For poetic spirit, he should emulate Walt Whitman, learning to embrace the body of the city and contain multitudes, dirt and all. The masculine realism of Winslow Homer inspired all the Ashcan artists--they, especially Henri and Bellows, wanted to be Homers of the city.

The most talented painters among them were Henri, Bellows and Sloan. Glackens turned into a late-blooming Impressionist, and Shinn was essentially an illustrator, while Luks' coarse, rhetorical talent produced a lot of formulaically macho painting leavened only by a few significant works, such as The Wrestlers, 1905.

Bellows died in 1925, at only 43, and all his best paintings were finished by 1913, the year of the Armory Show. They were the works of a fast-eyed, brilliantly responsive artist whose style looked modern, and in some respects was modern, without offending American conservatives. Bellows' reputation as a radical had more to do with his lowlife subjects and journalistic speed than with any avant-gardeness in the work. His political ideas, like those of Sloan and Henri, were in some general way socialist-anarchist without being particularly militant. He leaned toward a pastoral, unthreatening vision of the disorganized poor, spiced with humor, as in his portraits of tough Irish street urchins or the famous Forty-Two Kids, 1909--not, alas, in this show--depicting a swarm of knobby pale boys horsing around and diving into the Hudson from a broken-down pier.

He had a terrific nose for a story. One of the biggest in New York circa 1909 was illicit prizefighting, and Bellows made intensely vivid and memorable images of it. Ashcan painting, in its description of the Darwinian world of fists evoked by American realist writers like Frank Norris and Jack London, lagged behind literature by 10 years or more, but its attachment to images of clash and struggle aligned it squarely with the American cultural ideology of the day--Theodore Roosevelt's praise of the strenuous life.

The most lyrical--but also the most politically acerbic--of the Ashcan artists was Sloan. A fervent admirer of the social vision of French lithographers, especially Gavarni and Daumier, he kept his satire for the illustrations he did for The Masses and other left-wing magazines. His painted world was more amiable, with its fleshy, rosy girls in dance halls or promenading in Washington Square Park--a Brooklyn Fragonard whispering to a Hester Street Renoir. Sloan saw his people as part of a larger totality, the carnal and cozy body of the city itself, where even the searchlight on top of Madison Square Garden, he wrote, "was scratching the belly of the sky and tickling the building." He liked the roaring dynamism of the El, and in Election Night, 1907, he combined it with a flushed, disorderly crowd in a sort of modern kermis.

Sloan was, as Willem de Kooning would say of himself many years later, a slipping glimpser, with a strong sense of the fleeting moment in which people are caught unawares--arguments on the fire escape, a woman pegging out the wash, lovers furtively embracing on the tenement roof. And though his vision was less flamboyant than Henri's or Bellows', he clearly had a deep effect on younger painters like Reginald Marsh and Hopper. His moments of voyeuristic detachment were amplified in Hopper's glimpses of disconnected urban souls seen through windows. One wants to see more of Sloan; when will some American museum give him the retrospective he deserves?