Review: Up Close and Impersonal: Ashcan Art, City Life, and Democratic Politics

Reviewed Work(s): Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School by Rebecca
Zurier
Review by: Kevin R. McNamara
Source: The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Oct., 2007), pp.
476-478
Published by: Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25144502
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476 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / October 2007

Up Close and Impersonal: Ashcan Art,

City Life, and Democratic Politics
ZURIER, REBECCA. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School.
Berkeley: University of CaUfornia Press, 2006. x + 407 pp. Introduction,

iUustrations, notes, bibUography, index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520

22018-8.

The reputation of the American painters coUectively known as the

Ashcan School fluctuates with shifts in art-historical judgment between aes
thetic and social criteria. The present dominance of cultural studies method
ologies among American art historians is propitious for these artists, whose

overarching subject was the diversity of populations and experience in the

industrial city of immigrants at the turn of the previous century. Robert

Henri, Everett Shinn, WilUam Glackens, George Luks, George BeUows, and
John Sloan may never have appUed the epithet "Ashcan" to their aesthetic?
that was the work of a later critic?yet as a badge of authenticity it has an

undoubted cachet. WilUam B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff's recent com

pendium, New York Modern, casts these artists as a heroic modern alternative

to the formaUst currents of European modernism.1

Rebecca Zurier is a rather more judicious guide to these six painters, one
who does not let her admiration for their urban vision bUnd her to its Um
its. She is amply prepared for this undertaking by her previous work, which
includes Art for 'The Masses" a study of the graphic art selected by Sloan for

that landmark magazine of the American left, and Metropolitan Eives: The
Ashcan Artists and Their New York, a catalog she co-authored for an exhibi
tion she co-curated. Picturing the City expands the treatment of themes intro

duced in her catalog essays. The opening suite of three chapters situates the
artists in their cultural and visual miUeu; a wealth of visual and verbal texts

add texture to a cultural history of New York that draws on the work of
Neil Harris, WilUam Leach, Kathy Peiss, Christine StanseU, and WilUam R.
Taylor. The second section, "The Artists," presents five of the artists in four

chapters, pairing Luks with BeUows. "The StoryteUer's Vision," a chapter

length section devoted to Sloan, closes the study.

These six artists did not picture the city by producing iconic or carto
graphic images of a unified urban entity That project better describes the
work of their contemporaries, the City Beautiful planners and tonaUst and
impressionist painters. Ashcan work is resolutely local; scenes from a partic
1 William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff, New York Modern: The Arts and the City (Baltimore,

1999), 22-27.

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Book Reviews All

ular class or ethnic quarter often are specified down to the intersection, for
example Thompson and Bleeker Streets', Sixth Avenue and 30th Street; Election

Night, Herald Square, 1907. Most of these painters began their careers as
newspaper illustrators in the days before news photography. When they
turned to painting, their focus remained on passing scenes of public life and
private moments on public view. Their characteristic painterly styles featured

a "sketch-like handling of paint" (11) and a lack of finish that gives the
impression of something fleetingly captured.

Zurier does a splendid job of presenting the formal characteristics of

these paintings, but her true subject is the vision that informed them. As
invoked in the subtitle, "urban vision" signifies at least three things: what the

artists chose to see and to make their subjects; how they imagined their rela

tion to the spectacle they beheld and the citizens they moved among; and
the very activity of looking within a city increasingly organized as spectacle,

in which glances and gazes could be a form of consumption but might also
be political gestures that acknowledged or denied strangers' citizenly claims
on the looker.

Zurier is at her interdisciplinary best in these analyses. To bring out the

importance of vision at that time, she draws at once on the literary tradition

of urban spectatorship, notably Walt Whitman's transcendental-democratic

ethos (which, through Henri, inspired all of the Ashcan painters); Charles

Baudelaire's flaneur, and realist fiction in the United States, France, and

England; such contemporaneous genres of urban social control as home

mission records and newspaper human interest stories; and, quite astutely,
on work on the gaze in early cinema drawn from the landmark 1995 collec
tion, Viewing Positions.1 The constellation produces wonderful insights into

the art and the problems of urban vision. Zurier describes how the artists
strove to make their city knowable by creating a mise en scene that allowed the

viewer to reconstruct a narrative around the image by calling up related visu

al and textual images?lessening the distance between painter and subject,

and viewer and subject. Even though an artist like Sloan ultimately leaves the

scene underdetermined, conceding the city's mystery (303), such acts of

urban vision and recognition ran counter to the modernist stance toward the

city embodied by Baudelaire, whose work plumbed the complex emotions

stirred by alienation and the frustrated desire for communion, the city's
simultaneous provision of a seeming wealth of opportunity and a dearth of

access. (Unfortunately, Baudelaire is rather misrepresented in this study

because Zurier identifies the flaneur as a "dandified urban stroller" [e.g. 12],

conflating the figures of the flaneur, or "passionate spectator," with the

dandy and identifying Baudelaire with this emotionally detached figure.)
2Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, 1995).

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478 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / October 2007

Zurier's treatment of each artist concludes with an assessment of where

the artist feU short of identification with the diversity he beheld: Henri was

unable to think beyond raciaUzed types, Shinn did not move from the pic
turesque to a sociaUy engaged art, Glackens faded to comprehend the ghet
to, and BeUow and Luks were consistently unable to transcend caricature.
Sloan, the greatest of the six, was hobbled by "his admission of difference
between himself and the neighbors he depicted, [which] made a transparent
gaze impossible" (288). The artists' faUure is to be expected, but its handUng
yields the one weakness in this otherwise exceUent study. Instead of treating

the fauure as a personal Umitation of the six painters, Zurier might have
considered the impUcations of the personal and other factors, which ensure
there is no transparent gaze (except in romantic, urbanist fantasy). Certainly,
two strengths of the modernist urban vision were its exploration of the anx

ieties and ambivalent feeUngs that the artist did know, emotions that were

not the province of a certain sensitive class alone, and the preservation of
mystery and ambiguity when imagining a narrative was practicing a form of
social control. If it is true?and it is?that, as Colson Whitehead writes of

New York, "there are eight milUon cities in this naked city" (quoted 311),
then a desire for transparency and legibdity of urban vision seems Uke a
desire for a world in which differences exist but do not signify. An art his
tory influenced by cultural studies might regard the absence of a transpar

ent gaze not as a poUtical fadure but as the very condition of poUtics' pos
sibiUty Nevertheless, this is the fuUest account and richest analysis of the
Ashcan artists and is Ukely to remain so for some time. Picturing the City is a

study of keen interest to aU scholars and students of American urban cul

ture in the Progressive Era, one I wiU certainly use in my classes.

Kevin R McNamara
University of Houston?Clear Eake

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