Ashcan Artist Everett Shinn painted “Eviction” in 1904
The Ashcan Artists who inhabited the physical realms of New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were renown for their depictions of a city in motion. The sheer power of their representations of human life against the background of a transforming New York made them prominent as prophets of 20th century modernization.
As a born-and-bred New Yorker, I was deeply moved by a review of their works in a Smithsonian volume titled “Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York,” which my sister presented to me on my 80th birthday. We grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during the Depression years and were aware of some of the scenes painted at the turn of the century. Some of those scenarios still existed in our neighborhood. We knew that our father, who was in this late teens at the turn of the century, had lived through the events depicted by the Ashcan artists. He might have been in the crowds of the city scenes. So the paintings were very real to us.
But as I read the stories of current New York dramas today—for example, the explosion and collapse of the tenement buildings in Harlem—the thought occurred to me, “If the Ashcan artists were to return to New York today, what would they paint?” Several of them had come from journalism backgrounds and had sketched for their newspapers the urban disasters that made news headlines in their time. They brought these skills to painting the events that were shaping people’s lives in a changing New York.
The artists were part of the Progressive Era, which the new century had ushered in within the metropolitan centers. Manhattan’s West Side was being dug up for the Pennsylvania Railroad Station and New York’s elevated lines were being extended into upper Manhattan. Horse-drawn wagons were being replaced by faster motor vehicles travelling on newly covered asphalt avenues. New department stores displaying the latest women’s fashions were vying for the attention and business of the growing population of female workers. These same women inhabited the offices of the newly built high-rise buildings and also the sweatshops within the lofts in the garment district. The Ashcan artists caught all this action in their timepiece paintings of New York.
Ashcan Artist William Glackens painted ” Far From the Fresh Air Farm” in 1911
It has been said that the Ashcan artists were not the social protestors of their time. They were not making a statement. They were painting what they saw in the life of New York. This was the reality of a New York on its way to becoming a major metropolitan center. In the process, the Ashcan artists were providing the evidence and giving voice to those who were protesting the widening gap in the U.S. economic system.
What would the Ashcan artists paint today if they returned to New York? What are the realities of New York life in its contrasts today? The New York Times recently reported on the real estate market on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The scene was the perpetual hunt for a livable space among the young in the competitive housing market of New York. Some of the apartments in which they finally settle down are in the tenement buildings, in rehabilitated form, from which poorer tenants have had to move. The rent for a one-bedroom apartment, which now runs from $ 2,500 to $2,700, would have paid all the rents in the tenements on the First Avenue block from 80th to 81st Streets where my family lived in the early 1930s. Where do the poor move to who can’t afford to live in New York? What does poverty look like today? What scenes would the Ashcan artists be attracted to in the new milieu of New York City life?