The six “Ashcan” artists painted New York City with headlong ardor and limited subtlety starting around the turn of the century; George Bellows, Robert Henri, and John Sloan are the big names. They petered out gradually in the wake of the 1913 Armory show, which introduced Americans to the Fauves and Cubists and turned the six erstwhile American avant-gardists into fuddy- duddies overnight — one of the meanest tricks in modern art history. Picture Hillary Clinton awakening one morning to discover that the entire country had moved left and she was now a Republican, utterly devoid of compassion ex hypothesi. I for one would want to make sure all White House lamps were battened down tight. The Ashcanners had little originality and merely adequate technique, but their passion and swagger make them interesting. ” Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York,” at the New-York Historical Society through August 4, underlines a strange fact: The conviction that you are an important painter doesn’t make you one, but it helps. Given the necessary minimum of dexterity, vision, and heart, authority is the magic ingredient that separates Art from Noodling Around. The only way to get it is to take it; the Ashcan painters took it.
“Metropolitan Lives” is intriguing for another reason too. These artists were rock-ribbed leftists, but steadfastly refused to mix art and politics. ” While I am a Socialist,” John Sloan wrote, “I never allowed social propaganda to get into my paintings.” It is a line so radically different from what most artists say today, so obviously germane to the ongoing political and cultural debate, you might have expected the press to descend like flies on ” Metropolitan Lives.” But somehow most journalists missed this story.
