American realism
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Oil on canvas, 40 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (102.2 x 107 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- See also: Ashcan School
American realism was a turn of the century idea in art, music and literature that showed through these different types of work, reflections of the time period. Whether it was a cultural portrayal, or a scenic view of downtown New York City, these images and works of literature, music and painting depicted a contemporary view of what was happening; an attempt at defining what was real.
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[edit] Introduction
During the late 19th century, and into the 20th century artists and musicians contributed to the idea of realism in the American setting. Each though slightly different in concept or subject was defining what was going on in front of his or her eyes, without imagining a past or a future. While it has been stated that American Realism was a Neoclassical movement borrowing from ancient classical interpretations of art and architecture, this statement is false. American Realism was actually the opposite; instead of reflecting back to antiquities, artists and musicians were concerned with the grit and the reality of the early 20th century in America.
[edit] America at the turn of the century
During the late 19th century through the early 20th century the United States experienced enormous industrial, economic, social and cultural change. A continuous wave of European immigration and the rising potential for international trade brought increasing growth and prosperity to America. Through art and artistic expression (through all mediums including painting, literature and music), American Realism attempted to portray the exhaustion and cultural exhuberance of the figurative American landscape and the life of ordinary Americans at home. Artists used the feelings, textures and sounds of the city to influence the color, texture and look of their creative projects. Musicians noticed the quick and fast paced nature of the early 20th century and responded with a fresh and new tempo. Writers and authors told a new story about Americans; boys and girls real Americans could have grown up with. Pulling away from fantasy and focusing on the now, American Realism presented a new gateway and a breakthrough — introducing modernism, and what it means to be in the present.
[edit] Ashcan School
The Ashcan School was a group of New York City artists who sought to capture the feel of turn-of-the-century New York City, through realistic and unglamorized portraits of everyday life. These artists were not only depicting the rich and promising Fifth Avenue socialites, but the lower class richly and culturally textured immigrants. One critic of the time did not like their choice of subjects, which included alleys, tenements, slum dwellers, and in the case of John Sloan, taverns frequented by the working class. They became known as the revolutionary black gang and apostles of ugliness.[1]
[edit] George Bellows
George Bellows (1882-1925), painted city life in New York City. His paintings had an expressionist boldness and a willingness to take risks. He had a fascination with violence as seen in his painting, Both Members of this Club, which depicts a rather gory boxing scene. In his painting titled Cliff Dwellers, (above), we find a city-scape that is not one particular view but a composite of many views.
[edit] Robert Henri
Robert Henri, (1865-1921) was an important American Realist and a member of The Ashcan School. Henri was interested in the spectacle of common life. He focused on individuals, strangers, quickly passing in the streets in towns and cities. He had a sympathetic portrayal rather that a comic portrayal of people, often using a dark background to add to the warmth of the person portrayed. His works have a heavy impasto which stressed the materiality of the paint and the painter. He influenced Glackens, Luks, Shinn and Sloan.[citation needed] In 1906, he was elected to the National Academy of Design, but when painters in his circle were rejected for the Academy's 1907 exhibition, he accused fellow jurors of bias and walked off the jury, resolving to organize a show of his own. He would later refer to the Academy as a cemetery of art.
[edit] Everett Shinn
Everett Shinn (1876-1953), a member of the Ashcan School, he was the youngest member of the group of modernist painters who explored the depiction of real life. He is most famous for his numerous paintings of New York and the theater and of various aspects of luxury and modern life inspired by his home in New York City. He painted theater scenes from London, Paris and New York. He found interest in the urban spectacle of life, drawing parallels between the theater and crowded seats and life. Unlike an artist like Degas, Shinn depicted interaction between the audience and performer.
[edit] George Benjamin Luks
George B. Luks (1866-1933), was an Ashcan school artist whom lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In Luks' painting, Hester Street (1905), he shows children being entertained by a man with a toy while a woman and shopkeeper have a conversation in the background. The viewer is among the crowd rather than above it. Luks puts a positive spin on the Lower East Side by showing two young girls dancing in The Spielers, which is a type of dance that working glass immigrants would engage in; despite the poverty, children dance on the street. He looks for the joy and beauty in the life of the poor rather than the tragedy.[citation needed]
[edit] William Glackens
William Glackens (1870-1938), painted the neighborhood surrounding his studio in Washington Square Park. Instead of using strangers Glackens got his friends to pose in their finest clothes as café goers and shoppers. His work relates to Manet in that they both convey the glitter, fashion, spectacle and isolation of urban nightlife. In The Shoppers, Glackens depicts consumerism which was a rising activity for women in their lives as urban dwellers.[citation needed]
[edit] John Sloan
John Sloan (1871-1951), was an Early 20th Century Realist of the Ashcan School, whose concerns with American social conditions led him to join the Socialist Party in 1910.[2] Originally from Philadelphia, he worked in New York after 1904. From 1912–1916, he contributed illustrations to the socialist monthly The Masses. Sloan disliked propaganda, and in his drawings for The Masses, as in his paintings, he focused on the everyday lives of people. He depicted the leisure of the working class with an emphasis on female subjects. Among his best known works are Picnic Grounds and Sunday, Women Drying their Hair. He disliked the Ashcan School label,[3] and expressed his annoyance with art historians who identified him as a painter of the American Scene: "Some of us used to paint little rather sensitive comments about the life around us. We didn't know it was the American Scene. I don't like the name ... A symptom of nationalism, which has caused a great deal of trouble in this world."[4]
[edit] Mark Twain
Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Early 19th-century American writers tended to be too flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious - partially because they were still trying to prove that they could write as elegantly as the English.[citation needed] Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm. For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Twain is best known for his works Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
[edit] Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane (1871-1900), born in New Jersey, had roots going back to Revolutionary War era, soldiers, clergymen, sheriffs, judges, and farmers who had lived a century earlier. Primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays, Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His haunting Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, was published to great acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in the attention before he died, at 29, having neglected his health. He has enjoyed continued success ever since - as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist. Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic American novel. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love, and eager to escape her violent home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but soon commits suicide out of despair. Crane's earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist work.[citation needed]
[edit] William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells (1837-1920), wrote fiction and essays in the realist mode. His ideas about realism in literature developed in parallel with his socialist attitudes.[citation needed] In his role as editor of the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine, and as the author of books such as A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells exerted a strong opinion and was influential in establishing his theories.[citation needed]
[edit] Jacob Riis
Jacob August Riis (1849-1914), a Danish-American muckraker journalist, photographer, and social reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark. He is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the less fortunate in New York City, which was the subject of most of his prolific writings and photographic essays. He helped with the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. As one of the first photographers to use flash, he is considered a pioneer in photography.[5]
[edit] James A. Bland
James Allen Bland (1854-1919). was the first prominent African American Songwriter[citation needed] known for his ballad titled Carry me Back to Old Virginny. In the Evening by the Moonlight, and Golden Slippers are also well known songs of his. Songs of his that were major hits during the period are In the Morning by the Bright Light and De Golden Wedding. Bland wrote most of his songs from 1879 to 1882; in 1881 he left America for England with Haverly's Genuine Colored Minstrels. Bland found England more rewarding than the United States and stayed there until 1890; either he stopped writing songs during this period or he was unable to find an English publisher.[citation needed]
[edit] C.A. White
C.A. White (1829-1892) wrote a hit song in 1869, Put Me in My Little Bed, establishing him as a major songwriter. White was a songwriter of serious aspirations: many of his songs were written for vocal quartets. He also made several attempts at opera. As half-owner of the music publishing firm White-Smith and Co., he had a ready outlet for his work: but it was his songs that supported the publishing firm and not the other way around. White did not scorn writing for the popular stage—indeed he wrote a song for the pioneering African-American stage production Out of Bondage—but his principal output was for the parlor singer.[citation needed]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] Sources
- Brooks, Van Wyck (1955). John Sloan. New York: Dutton.
- Hills. Reading American Art ed. By Marianne Doezma and Elizabeth Milroy. Yale University Press: New Haven. 1998 ( pps. 311)
- Loughery, John (1997). John Sloan: Painter and Rebel . New York: Holt. ISBN 0-8050-5221-6
- Pohl, Frances K. Framing America. Thames and Hudson: 2002. (page 302-312)
[edit] External links
- Music: New Generations of Songwriters: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/smhtml/smessay1.html
- Literatue: American Realism: http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/lit5.htm
