Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (review)

Cities are peculiarly suited to interdisciplinary analysis: people live cheek by jowl in urban space and so do ideas. The desire to represent the metropolis's intermingling cultural strains lies at the heart of many recent books on New York City, from Ann Douglas's vital Terrible Honesty (1995) to Christine Stansell's American Moderns (2000) to Douglas Tallack's New York Sights (2005). Rebecca Zurier joins this lively critical crowd with her study of the turn-of-the-century artists known as the Ashcan School. Earlier paintings of New York City were characterized by distance, often impressionistic blurs or bird's-eye views that raised viewers above the fray (87); Ashcan artists, by contrast aimed for a street-level realism. All newcomers to New York around the turn of the century, these painters interrogate the "public culture of looking" in various ways (51). Zurier moves from the portraits of Robert Henri (1865–1929) to the streetscapes of Everett Shinn (1876–1953), from the vigorous caricatures of William Glackens (1870–1938), George Luks (1867–1933), and George Bellows (1882–1925) to the elliptical narratives of John Sloan (1871–1951). All of these paintings, she argues, "address you as a fellow onlooker" (2), with both the friendliness and the anonymity so central to city life.

Throughout Picturing the City, the scenes on Ashcan School canvases appear not as reified or isolating sights, but as interventions in an ongoing dialogue on urban spectatorship. The book's first section, titled "The Setting," is a capacious and fascinating reconsideration of this era's public culture as it plays out on the sidewalks of New York. Here Zurier articulates the centrality of urban vision to a wide array of contemporaneous discourses, including realist fiction, the popular press, sociology, politics, and early film. Her thick description has a corrective purpose: she wants to move beyond models of visuality that depend on the figure of the flaneur—the prototypical urban spectator so celebrated by Baudelaire and Benjamin. Zurier makes the case for an alternative tradition of more engaged "mobile urban observers" (91), city residents such as Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, and Jacob Riis, who felt a responsibility toward the people that they depicted. Yet these figures also invoke one of the central problems of Progressive Era visual culture, the flattening discourse of the picturesque. In writing of this period, scenes of poverty, crime, and immigrant life were often described as aesthetic sights, thrilling armchair tourists and slumming New Yorkers alike. Ashcan School paintings exemplify this conflicted attitude toward the "huddled masses": stereotyping and humanizing impulses coexist in uncomfortable proximity in pictures such as William Glackens's Far from the Fresh Air Farm . . . (1911), which depicts a street on the Lower East Side.

Zurier previously dealt with this group of artists in Metropolitan Lives (1995), an exhibition catalog for the Smithsonian American Art Museum on which she collaborated with Robert Snyder and Virginia Mecklenburg. Metropolitan Lives laid the groundwork for understanding Ashcan School painters in an urban studies context, but it often made them seem like mere transcribers of the historical change around them. Picturing the City refines and complicates that work through an attention to painterly style as it shapes, and is shaped by, the culture of New York. The case studies that comprise the second section, for example, juxtapose the work of an individual artist with a relevant contemporary mass medium in order to illuminate both. Perhaps the most accomplished of these chapters deals with Everett Shinn and his engagement with the technology and culture of newspaper reporting. Zurier argues that the "sense of haste" (147) in Shinn's reductive style and sketchlike line, learned in his days as a newspaper illustrator, imbues even the most carefully composed paintings with an on-the-spot vividness. Zurier also considers the relationship between William Glackens's cartooning and the ethnic fiction it often accompanied; George Bellows's painting Forty-two Kids (1907) and the newspaper comics...