Feature: Exhibition - An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square until May 30

Published: 14 April, 2011
by JOHN EVANS

THE Ashcan School was an early 20th- century loose grouping of urban realists brought together in revolt against the academic mainstream and inspired by the idea of creating “pictures from life”.

Their intellectual inspiration as teacher and mentor was Robert Henri (1865-1929) and two of his portraits feature in the National Gallery’s small new introductory exhibition of just a dozen works never before shown in the UK.

They include his informal picture of Josephine Nivison, brushes in hand, as a student of 22. She would later marry Edward Hopper, another Henri student.

The circle of artists, principally in New York and Philadelphia, included George Luks, William Glackens and John Sloan (at times all newspaper illustrators), who each have a single painting here. They were among the so-called “Eight”, an earlier grouping brought into being after the National Academy of Design rejected their works for its 1907 exhibition. So, under Henri, they put on their own 1908 show in New York.

Standing slightly apart is their later collaborator George Wesley Bellows (1882-1925) whose daring use of vivid colours and animated brushwork can be seen in his North River of 1908, which depicts a train running along the Hudson and ferry leaving for New Jersey. As one critic says it’s “the modern world intersecting with nature”.

He has seven of the 12 pictures in An American Experiment, including those, such as “The Big Dory”, from his time at Monhegan Island off the Maine coast, where an artists’ colony was set up. There are urban scenes, the grittiness of which led to the “Ashcan” moniker, including his dark , night-time, depiction of construction work at Manhattan’s Pennsylvania station, hanging alongside a brilliant park snow scene. And Sloan’s tough street scene has figures almost as caricatures.

It’s a pity there are no examples of Bellows’ paintings of prize-fighters, for which he is rightly remembered.

Bellows helped Henri organise the legendary 1913 Armory Show which opened in New York and toured the US and which many see as the point from which modern American art dates.

This is the first in a collaborative series with the Terra Foundation for American Art, pledged to bring US “master-works” to London over several years.

• An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters, daily, free admission, until May 30 at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, WC2. www.nationalgallery.co.uk www.terraamericanart.org