Collection: Ashcan School

The Ashcan School designates a loose group of American realist painters working in New York between roughly 1900 and 1915. The name was coined as a pejorative by the cartoonist Art Young in The Masses in March 1916, complaining of pictures of ashcans and girls on Horatio Street, and was subsequently adopted by the painters themselves. Robert Henri (1865–1929) led the group as both painter and teacher, urging students to take urban working class life as their principal subject and to break from the genteel academic landscape and the American Impressionists.

The core membership were Henri, John Sloan (1871–1951), William Glackens (1870–1938), George Luks (1867–1933), and Everett Shinn (1876–1953). George Bellows (1882–1925), Edward Hopper in his early years, Stuart Davis, Glenn Coleman, and Jerome Myers were closely associated. The 1908 exhibition of The Eight at the Macbeth Galleries in New York was the movement's defining public moment, followed by the Independent Artists Show of April 1910. The same painters helped organise the 1913 Armory Show, which brought European modernism to the United States and reframed the Ashcan group as the older guard of American art rather than its avant garde. Bellows's lithographs of prizefights and Sloan's New York etchings remain the period's most circulated prints.