A spokesman said: "It's probably the most important 20th century painting the National Gallery owns - and was the first of only two paintings by Bellows, one of the famous New York
Ashcan School of artists, who were operating in the first 20 years of the 20th century.
The
Ashcan School was an artistic movement in the United States during the early 20th century that is best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the city's poorer neighborhoods.
(28) After working as a photographer in Canada for a number of years, Geller came to Chicago in 1918 and studied in 1919 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with
Ashcan School artist and visiting lecturer George Bellows.
Hopper was part of a group of artists referred to as the "
Ashcan school" because, writes Westheider in an essay accompanying the exhibition, "they expressed the urban reality of the street for the first time."
Pach, already liberated by the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase (with whom he studied), was equally responsive to the "Art Spirit" that animated Robert Henri's students, the
Ashcan School painters.
Indeed, that objective is entrenched in one of the collection's early signature works, its jaunty and rather carefree portrait of Mrs Whitney herself in turquoise silk pyjamas, by the
Ashcan school painter Robert Henri; it was painted in 1916, when she had already founded the Whitney Studio to assist and champion American artists (Fig.
Here, in force, are the regionalists who worked on the shores of Cape Cod and northern California, in Dallas and Charleston, SC, as well as the
Ashcan School of New York, Hayter's Atelier 17, and countless other small ateliers and workshops well off the beaten paths and often unknown and unseen.
Clarifying that Bernstein was neither a student of Robert Henri nor a member of the
Ashcan School, a long-held misconception, further underscores the extent to which an artist's critical trajectory is framed by the significance of her position or affiliation, at times understood as both a privilege and an anomaly.
It was carried on in America by the
Ashcan school, which included such artists as George Bellows, Robert Henri, and Edward Hopper.
Coming from the urban realism of The
Ashcan School, my newest portfolio works to move my inner vision of the world around me into reality; to make the invisible visible.
(20) Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the
Ashcan School (Berkeley: U of California P, 2006).
The old masters, the French Impressionists, the
Ashcan School, the abstract expressionists and the other various schools and trends no doubt each has supporters and enthusiasts.
