The Ashcan School (pt. 3)

Similarly, in this painting of Dempsey and Firpo, the American artist George Bellows has offered a Realist subject that is painted not so realistically.  We see an utterly dramatic stage picture of the climactic end to yet another boxing tournament.  The lighting alone is like something out of a movie, atmospheric and epic, creating an aura of heightened melodrama.  We see the loser plunging most catastrophically to the ground below—not even inside the wire fence; he has literally been punched out of the ring.  His body contorts in an uncontrolled pose (rather an awkward and unrealistic one, at that) as he plummets into the crowd.  An approaching referee enters onto the scene from the right to further proclaim the loser's defeat with a definitive, downward-pointing finger.  From the other side of the ring, arms raised in applause and mouths opened loud in cheers or protests embody the lively crowd at this energetic and ultimately epic social gathering.  The unfortunate spectators in the front rows of the foreground duck or stand back to avoid the tumbling body.  In the center of it all, our champion, the winner of the fight, having just delivered his crushing blow, stands in a heroic pose reminiscent of the athletic poses of Ancient Greek statues like the Discuss Thrower.  Athletic ability is being glorified here.  The dramatic lighting highlights and silhouettes this victorious boxer, who stands tallest in the painting, and we can especially see his flexed and tensed muscles, red with heat and strain.  Both his failed opponent and he are in complex and nearly impossible poses, exaggerating their athletic prowess and making them appear larger than life, like gods clashing in momentous conflict.  This and the smooth, stylistically drawn faces of the different members of the crowd (who each wear different outfits) characterize the social event as a glamorous cultural phenomenon.  Bellows creates a quasi-Romanticized vision of the boxing match as a tangible or realistic expression of an art form perhaps truer to realism but no less in touch with the theoretical implications of style in painting.

The Ashcan School (pt. 2)

George Bellows was not a member of the Ashcan School, but his paintings bore similarity to those of John French Sloan and the movement of American Realism.  A backlash against the wild freedoms of the European Cubists and Expressionists, Bellows' art harkens back to the late Victorian tenants of traditional Realism, while combining these with looser restrictions and greater freedoms toward personal style and subject matter.  The artist concentrated most on the subject he loved most: sports.  Bellows especially liked to paint boxing matches because he spent most of his time at the athletic club.

This painting, titled Stag at Sharkey's, he produced in 1909.  Here the artist has reverted to a clearly delineated subject matter (a boxing match) which bears its own manifest cultural significance, but Bellows has added his own technical approach to style in the execution of the painting.  To recreate the violent action of the ring he has applied the paint to the canvas using slashing brushstrokes.  With strong diagonal lines and blurred contours he has captured this swift action and the powerful determination of the opponents.  The faces of the crowd of course blur back into the dark; all attention is drawn to the center of the action in the center of the work.  But even amid his Realist style, Bellows can't avoid painting blurred figures, almost Impressionistically, to convey the sense of movement and the physicality and muscular force of such a scene.  Though conservative in subject matter, the painting employs unconventional methods of artistic technique.  There is a blend of innovation and traditionalism, then—and that perfectly characterizes the art of the Ashcan School.

The Ashcan School (pt. 1)

Meanwhile in America, an art world was developing entirely of its own invention.  Although success and popularity in the art world then still required study in Europe, many painters chose not to follow the methods of European Cubism and Abstract Art because they found those ways too complicated.  Instead, this class of American artists in the early 1900s focused their efforts on more conservative art and paintings of traditional subjects and subject matter, not focusing on finding new approaches and images to paint.  It may not have been the most exciting of developments in the history of art given the apparent lack of progress toward artistic theories and innovative styles, but this counter-movement, so to speak, found a niche of its own.

The world did not stop developing technologically.  The business world (especially of America) was on an incline, and city populations continued to rise.  The world was an environment of growing industrial nations, at least until the war.  Newer generations adapted to the changed scenery, and a new Modern life was fully adopted.  With these changes came questions of identity and the shrinking away of the old customs, but some artists sought to answer these philosophical problems through simply opening one's eyes to the contemporary world.  Such was the itinerary of the Ashcan School.

The Ashcan School became the popular name identifying the group of artists who made realistic pictures of the most ordinary features of the contemporary scene.  These were artists who rebelled against the idealism of an academic approach to art and instead sought to paint life as they saw it being played out all around them.  American art, then, focusing on what was to be seen on the Modern scene, turned to city's night-life and cafés, streets, alleys, and theaters.  The Ashcan School in particular played a major role in American art from about 1908 to 1913, culminating in the great Armory Show of 1913, which was the first large exhibition of modern art in America.  For the first time on such a grand scale, the works of Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso (among many others) were brought to the attention of the American public, effectively involving them in the historical scene of European art (though Paris remained—and in some respects has remained even to this day—the center of the art world on a whole).  In total, the show presented 1300 works by 300 artists.

The European works caused the greatest excitement and controversy.  Some tried to understand the new works; some tried to explain them; but most just laughed at them or were enraged.  The finer delicacies of Cubist and Expressionist art are, after all, not easily detectable upon a first glance, but the Ashcan artists took particular disgust in such abstract-minded works.  The room where the Cubist paintings were hung became known as "the Room of Horrors" to them.  Surely art should be truer to real-life humanity, they concluded.  And I think there is a good chunk of the population today which would agree with them.