The Ashcan School and The Eight are now recognized as America's first
modern art movement: rejecting their academic training and the practices
of the National Academy of Design, they forged a new art that
represented America's shifting values. By focusing on urban streets
scenes, the lives of immigrants, popular entertainments, and the working
poor, this loosely affiliated group of artists became synonymous with
ordinary, everyday subjects -- in the words of one critic, "pictures of
ashcans." Yet this is only part of their story: they also experimented
with complex color theory and embraced scientific studies about movement
and perception, while also creating scenes of bourgeois leisure and
society portraits in attempts to reconcile their high-art practices with
their populist reputations. This catalog features nearly 130 works
across media, including paintings, drawings, pastels, and prints --
rarely seen objects and popular favorites. Collectively these works
emphasize the Ashcan School's and The Eight's valuable contributions to
the formation of American modernism at the beginning of the 20th
century.