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  • A Timely “Look” at the Ashcan School
  • Susanna W. Gold (bio)
Rebecca Zurier. Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. x + 408pp. Figures, color plates, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95.

Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School arrives at an opportune time, anticipating the centennial of the notorious 1908 exhibition, Eight American Painters, at New York City's MacBeth Galleries. Organized in protest against the conservatism of the authoritative National Academy of Design, this exhibition promoted the work of most of the six leading members of the so-called "Ashcan School"—Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, George Bellows, George Luks, and John Sloan—whose notebook sketches, commercial illustrations, and fine art serve as the basis of Rebecca Zurier's study. With the approach of 2008, Zurier's book joins a substantial amount of scholarly attention directed toward the Ashcan artists and their contemporaries, including two exhibitions and their accompanying catalogs: Seeing the City: Sloan's New York, organized by the Delaware Art Museum and traveling to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, and the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem; and Life's Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists' Brush With Leisure, 1895–1925, organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts and traveling to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville and the New-York Historical Society in New York City. While hosting Life's Pleasures, the New-York Historical Society will also sponsor an academic symposium at which Zurier will present her work on the Ashcan school.1

Eagerly awaited in Zurier's career-long investigation of a number of dimensions of the Ashcan artists' work, Picturing the City was preceded by two notable projects: Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and its Graphics, 1911–1917 (1988) and Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (with Robert W. Snyder and Virginia M. Mecklenburg [1995]). Both related to museum exhibitions, Zurier's Art for the Masses concentrates on the roles of graphic illustrations in a left-wing journal dedicated to serving the interests of the working classes, many of which were submitted by Ashcan artists, while her contributions to Metropolitan Lives supplies a thorough grounding in the [End Page 606] artists' careers, as well as the style, content, and context for understanding their urban subject matter.2 Though Picturing the City addresses much of the same imagery that Zurier has introduced elsewhere, it takes the reader well beyond either the focused specificity or the contextual breadth of her previous work. With this new project, Zurier elaborates the complex dynamics of "urban vision" and "urban representation"—the cultural practices of knowing, understanding, interacting, and communicating through multiple systems of visual exchange—which she locates at the intersections of mass media, fine art, and the lived experiences of the Ashcan artists. The results are well worth the wait. The winner of both the prestigious Charles C. Eldredge Prize by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for outstanding book-length scholarship in American Art and the NYC Book Award for Art from the New York Society Library, as well as a finalist for the College Art Association's Charles Rufus Morey Prize, Picturing the City is a richly satisfying analysis of how an image-saturated "culture of looking," which characterized the urban environment near the turn of the twentieth century, preoccupied the artists and conditioned how their works would function and be understood.

In the first of the book's two-part structure, Zurier discusses the Ashcan artists as a group to contextualize their work in a specific time and place. In a stage-setting chapter which the non-art historian will appreciate, Zurier introduces the history of the loose association of like-minded artists bound together by shared interests in the "expression of life and character," backgrounds in illustration, sketchlike stylistic tendencies, and an exploration of visuality, spectacle, and urban culture, which establishes their place solidly in the history of American modernism (p. 24). She not only links the Ashcan artists to each other in these respects, but she also draws thematic parallels between...

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