Lecture 1 - True to Life: The Ashcan School

Originally newspaper illustrators, The Ashcans drew on their journalistic origins in their immediate and visceral treatment of the rich and poor, the seedy and the joyous in the urban life of New York of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The ironic use of the term ‘school’ and the ‘ashcan’ label came about when the critics reacted negatively to what was seen as unworthy subject matter, painters of ash cans and tin alleys. Lead by Robert Henri, the movement was ‘tongue-in-cheek’ with little by way of a political or moral agenda to underpin it. Yet Henri and his associates, including William Glackens and John Sloan, would not only enjoy the patronage of New York’s great and good, but would influence thereafter in the art of America immediately after the Great Depression.