The Eight (artist group)
The Eight was a collective of eight American artists primarily associated with the Ashcan School, a movement that emerged around 1900, focusing on the realities of urban life. This group included notable figures such as Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Bellows, who sought to depict the gritty aspects of modern American society through their art. They organized a significant exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City in February 1908, which served as a protest against the conservative values of the National Academy of Design. The art produced by The Eight often showcased scenes of everyday life, portraying working-class individuals and addressing social issues, thus marking a departure from the more affluent themes commonly represented in earlier artistic movements. While five of the artists were directly linked to the Ashcan School, others such as Maurice Prendergast and Arthur B. Davies explored different styles and themes, further enriching the group's diversity. Through their loose, expressive techniques, The Eight challenged conventional aesthetics and resonated with contemporary social concerns, paving the way for future generations of American artists to engage with similar subjects. Their work remains influential in discussions of realism and urban representation in American art.
The Eight (artist group)
The Ashcan school and The Eight are overlapping names that identify the most important movement in American art around 1900. The Ashcan school refers to numerous American painters, illustrators, and printmakers active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mostly in Philadelphia and New York City. These artists depicted modern urban life in America as the nation was becoming more populous, urban, and industrial. They painted in loose, sketchy, colorful styles influenced by impressionism. The Eight was the name given to eight artists, mostly of the Ashcan school, who were grouped together for an exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City in February 1908. This exhibition was a seminal moment for the artists and the Ashcan School. The artists who comprised The Eight were Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, George Bellows, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, and Arthur B. Davies.
Brief History
The subjects of the Ashcan school included laborers, merchants, businessmen, wives and mothers engaged in domestic activities, children at play or loitering, people shopping, eating, and conversing, dilapidated buildings and stores, crowded streets, and other aspects of the lives of the working class, the poor, and urban dwellers. Their concern for current social and economic problems was new for American art and connects them to nineteenth century realism, rather than impressionism, which usually (but not always) favored more affluent and pleasant aspects of modern life. The name Ashcan school was coined in regard to the appearance in these artworks of rather unpleasant, gritty, and distasteful aspects of urban life, including dirt and garbage. It was inspired by Bellows’s 1915 drawing Disappointments of the Ashcan, which was published in The Philadelphia Record. The Ashcan school was a small, informal group of artists, not a formally organized institution as the name implies.
Only five of the artists in The Eight were part of the Ashcan school. Three were not: Lawson was an impressionist, Prendergast depicted urban life in a fauve-like style, and Davies explored literary and mythological narratives and was part of the symbolism movement. The momentous exhibition was organized in protest against the overbearing control and conservative values of the National Academy of Design. Before the exhibition, the artists knew one another and occasionally exhibited together, but never deliberately intended to forge a common style or movement. The artists of The Eight came from various parts of the United States, and in the 1890s they migrated to Philadelphia, where they studied art, came to know one another, and were illustrators for various newspapers. Between 1896 and 1904 they moved to New York.
Overview
Robert Henri was the oldest of these artists, their de facto leader of sorts, and one of the most important teachers of his time. He encouraged the others to depict everyday life in direct, honest, and vibrant ways, and to reveal what they observed factually and clearly. He made many portraits which adeptly capture personality and mood with loose, quick paint application and contrasts of light and dark colors. His Laughing Child and Portrait of Eva Green (both 1907) are particularly good examples of his portraiture. His West 57th Street, New York (1902) shows a major street in Manhattan on a snowy night, with pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages turning the snow into dirty slush. Such details are examples of "ashcan" realism.
John Sloan is considered the most talented and versatile Ashcan artist and the one most representative of the movement. His Hairdresser’s Window (1907) shows a buxom, curly haired woman tending to a customer as she stands by her shop’s second floor window in a small building on a crowded street in lower Manhattan. The viewer seems to be standing in the street behind numerous people on the sidewalk, who are staring at the scene above them. The street is loaded with cramped, decrepit, seedy stores frequented by ordinary, humble, shabby people. Chinese Restaurant (1909) depicts two businessmen, a young woman dressed in black and a feathered hat (perhaps a prostitute) who is feeding an attentive cat, and a disheveled man slurping his bowl of soup (perhaps her client) in a small Chinese restaurant decorated with red-checked tablecloths and Chinese posters and signs. Such small ethnic restaurants were opening all over New York at this time as the result of recent immigration. Social problems like prostitution were commonly seen in painting at this time. McSorley’s Bar (1912) features several working-class men standing at the counter talking as bartenders pour drinks and wash glasses. Sloan’s deft touch with contrasting light and dark tones and gestures and facial expressions creates a memorable scene of working-class leisure and male comradery in one of New York’s most historic Irish bars. This attentive feeling for a casual moment and social activities is very impressionist, but the interest in observing these aspects of daily life among the working class was new for American art. Backyards, Greenwich Village (1914) presents an incidental moment in the spaces behind the small, cramped tenements common in this Manhattan neighborhood as the city’s population tripled between the Civil War and World War I. In the snow a cat is running and a few children are playing.
The other Ashcan artists quickly adopted similar styles and themes. Glackens’ Hammerstein’s Roof Garden (1901) is a brushy, impressionistic scene of the Palace Roof Garden in New York, which at the time was a popular nighttime spot for theatrical and circus performances. Roof gardens were outdoors to provide cooler air in the summer and had artificial lighting so events could be held in the evening. In the painting, numerous affluent, urban couples sit at their tables and look above at a tightrope walker holding an umbrella. Such entertainments were new to modern life, as was the acceptability of women being in such bars and theaters with or without men accompanying them. Central Park in Winter (1905) is a lively, heartwarming scene of numerous children and some adults playing in the snow. It reveals how much the Ashcan painters learned about depicting light and color, weather and atmosphere from impressionism. Glackens’ Chez Mouquin (1905) depicts nicely dressed, affluent diners in a popular Manhattan French restaurant. By using such impressionist techniques as bringing us close to the figures, viewing them from the side, and cropping the scene to depict a popular impressionist subject, Glackens gives us a glimpse of a fleeting moment as this couple eats and converses with others who are outside the composition.
George Luks’ Hester Street (1905) is a blotchy, sketchy, loose rendering of one of the major shopping areas in the Lower East Side that shows the techniques of impressionism taken to the extreme. It shows factory workers with heavy beards and black clothes walking toward the viewer, a butcher’s shop with lots of fowl hanging in the window, and a street vendor selling toys and balloons to children. George Bellows may be best known for his depictions of boxing, such as Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of the Club (both 1909), where the vigorous punches of the fighters turns them into dynamic, violent blurs of color. Cliff Dwellers (1913) is an ironic title for Bellows’s depiction of the overcrowding of the urban poor in slums, which was a major concern for urban America at the time.
When these artworks were first exhibited and published they were surprising and unsettling to American viewers because they bluntly revealed current social and urban problems. Similar subjects had been depicted with even more unpleasant, difficult, and unsettling detail in the nineteenth century in Europe as part of realism and impressionism. Many artists active then and later in the twentieth century would explore these subjects in various ways and styles. Among them are the expressionists in Germany, the social realists in America in the 1930s and 1940s, and the neo-Dada artists of the 1950s.
Bibliography
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