Christine Stansell’s latest book is American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. She is a professor of history at Princeton.
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Vol. 18 No. 19 · 3 October 1996
page 25 | 2500 words
What are you looking at?
Christine Stansell
- Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York edited by Rebecca Zurier, Robert Snyder and Virginia Mecklenburg
Norton, 232 pp, £35.00, February 1996, ISBN 0 393 03901 3
New York in the late 19th-century never registered on anyone’s mind as a rival to London or Paris. But in the first two decades of the new century, it established itself as a pre-eminent metropolis for Europeans as well as Americans, an emblem of onrushing modernity which, for some, surpassed even Paris. ‘More than any other city in the world it is the fullest expression of our modern age,’ contended the cosmopolitan exile Leon Trotsky, who bided his time there for a few months in 1917. New York City had become a subject in its own right – newsworthy, sensational, visually entrancing.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 1 · 2 January 1997
From Patrick David Connors
It is true, as Christine Stansell says in her admirable review of Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan School and Their New York (LRB, 3 October 1996), that the Ashcan artists George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens and John Sloan started as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. But more important, these newspaper sketch-artists, as well as Robert Henri, were students of the Philadelphia School of Painting, which had recently been conceived at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Academy was once again establishing itself as the leading institution for artists interested in the ‘real’ depiction of American life. Thomas Eakins, who, more than anyone else, was responsible for this rekindling of aesthetic and intellectual excitement, was no longer teaching there but his presence was felt not only in the curriculum he founded but also through his protégé, the remarkable painter Thomas Anshutz, who was teaching there. The teachings and work of Anshutz would lay the aesthetic foundation of what was to become known as the Ashcan School. One only has to look at Anshutz’s major painting, The Steel Workers, Noontime, to realise where Henri and the others sought their inspiration.
It is in their early mature work, which also happens to be their best work, that we see depicted their Philadelphian artistic heritage. Perhaps this is the reason Stansell, like so many others, thought that Henri was a native of Philadelphia: he was not.
Patrick David Connors
Philadelphia
