Reginald Marsh, “Standpipe”

August 11, 2010 — Lisa N. Peters
Reginald Marsh, "Standpipe," 1948, Chinese ink on paper, 22 x 14 inches

Reginald Marsh, "Standpipe," 1948, Chinese ink on paper, 22 x 14 inches

Lisa N. Peters

From the 1920s through the 1940s the Social Realist painter Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) was the leading artistic interpreter of the public side of New York City life.  After graduating from Yale University, he began his career as an illustrator for such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, and Vanity Fair.  Subsequently he trained under the leading Ashcan School painters John Sloan and George Luks, which focused his interest on observing and recording the world around him.

While working in the realist mode of Ashcan art, Marsh also brought to his art a vigorous sculptural figural style inspired by his study of the art of the old masters in Europe. At the same time, he adopted broad frieze-like arrangements inspired by the popular mass media of his time. The result was a powerful and expressive vision of contemporary urban experience.  Marsh’s views of city life were the urban equivalent of the art of the Midwest Regionalist triumverate, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood.

Among Marsh’s favorite themes were the Bowery Bums, panhandlers, and breadlines common during the Depression, the popular urban entertainments of the day such as Coney Island, burlesque shows, and movie marquees, and the life of New York City streets, clogged with commercial lures and opportunities for people watching.  In Standpipe a well-dressed young woman, presumably on a shopping venture, strides along an urban street, oblivious to a store window crammed with eerie lifelike manikins wearing hats and a standpipe that, like the manikins, also seems to scrutinize her.  The sign stating “Standpipe / Connection” seems an ironic reference to the disengagement of individuals often crowded together on city streets. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About the Artist, Notable Paintings. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

The “Flying Pencil Point” of George B. Luks

May 12, 2010 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC

George B. Luks - Figure Study, Paris

George B. Luks (1867-1933), "Figure Study, Paris," 1900-10, charcoal and graphite on paper, 6 1/2 x 4 1/4 inches

Carol Lowrey

According to his friend and fellow artist Everett Shinn, George B. Luks (1867-1933) drew incessantly.  If his sketchbook wasn’t handy, he would draw on all types of surfaces, whether it be a scrap of paper, a tablecloth, or a napkin; as Shinn put it, he “chuckled as he worked, winked and drew an audience about his flying pencil point.”  Spanierman Gallery’s recent exhibition of works on paper includes two examples of Luks’s drawings––which attracted as much attention as the vigorously rendered oils that contributed to his reputation as a leading member of New York’s Ashcan School and an important American Realist.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Hendrik Glintenkamp (1887-1946)

January 28, 2010 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC

 

Hendrik Glintenkamp - Rooftops, Hoboken

Hendrik Glintenkamp (1887 - 1946), "Rooftops, Hoboken," oil on canvas, 25-3/4 x 32 inches

Carol Lowrey

When we think of American art of the early twentieth century, the work of Ashcan School painters such as Robert Henri and John Sloan and modernists such as John Marin immediately come to mind––so much so that we tend to forget about the accomplishments of talented but underappreciated individuals such as Hendrik Glintenkamp.  Known to his friends as “Glint,” he was a painter, printmaker, illustrator and sculptor––part of an artistic milieu that included such influential figures as Henri, Sloan and Stuart Davis.  There’s been relatively little written about Glintenkamp’s career as a painter; described by one commentator as an urbane individual who retained “a little of the old-fashioned glamour of the traditional artist, who with Bohemian insouciance tossed off masterpieces between two bouts and an orgy” (Ida E. Prigohzy, “Pen Portraits – H. Glintenkamp: Wanderer in Woodcuts,” Creative Art, March 1932), he was born in Augusta, New Jersey, the son of a Dutch father and a French mother.  He went on to study at the National Academy of Design in New York and then at the New York School of Art, where his teachers included Henri and Sloan.  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About the Artist. Tags: , , , . 11 Comments »

Ashcan School – Part III

October 1, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC
Ashcan School continued . . . Now that some issues of this quite confusing term have been addressed, it’s time to turn to the question of . . . what is it that makes an Ashcan School work, which seems less confusingWhat can be said in brief is that, instead of the genteel subjects painted by American artists inspired by French Impressionism, whose urban views generally consisted of the parks and squares frequented by the wealthy, Ashcan images depicted the new realities of urban experience in the early twentieth century, which meant that their creators (or the New York Realists) did not shy away from capturing the gritty, crude, and seamy aspects of New York life, not neglecting evidence of the disparities in social rank that were apparent during a day of dramatic immigration, a burgeoning lower class, dense neighborhoods bursting with tenements where laundry lines crisscrossed over dark alleyways, and urban crowding. They also painted the novelties of modern life in the city. They portrayed crowded street scenes where the El train rumbled overhead (the full awareness of the misery caused by these noisy tracks clanking overhead and dripping oil on pedestrians was not yet at the forefront in the 1910s), Chinese restaurants (a new phenomenon of New York life then—imagine that!), boxing matches (this was the prehistoric age of American professional sports), and children sledding in Central Park (it was a new idea then that children should have free time, the concept that is now destroying our lives—or at least mine), and yes, occasionally, vagrants picking through garbage left on the street. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Research. Tags: , , , . 3 Comments »

Ashcan School – Part II

September 29, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC

Arthur Bowen Davies
Children Playing, ca. 1896
Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 in, Lisa N. Peters
(Read Ashcan School-Part I and Ashcan School-Part III)
Controversy and question: so . . . where did the term “Ashcan School” originate from? Most scholars seem to agree that it appeared long after the heyday of the group, surfacing first in the 1934 book Art in America in Modern Times by art dealer Holger Cahill and art historian Alfred H. Barr, who used it to describe the derision with which the Eight’s 1908 Macbeth Galleries show was received. Cahill and Barr wrote that “in retrospect [the Eight’s] program seems moderate enough, but when they first showed as a group in New York in 1908, they were anathematized as ‘the Ashcan School’ and ‘the Revolutionary Black Gang.’” William Innes Homer in Robert Henri and His Circle (1969, Cornell University Press) says that it was Cahill who probably came up with the term, having heard it in a derisive statement made around the time by the cartoonist Art Young toward the earlier works of Sloan and others, which Young was contrasting negatively with the more socially conscious art of the then contemporary Regionalists. However, and a big however . . . Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Research. Tags: , , . 2 Comments »

Ashcan School – Part I

September 25, 2009 — Spanierman Gallery, LLC
Lisa N. Peters
(Read Ashcan School-Part II and Ashcan School-Part III)
 Focus on the Ashcan School. . . . hmm. We currently have an online Ashcan School show on our website, so the question came up of what exactly is the Ashcan School????I will try to answer this question as succinctly as possible in a three-part post series.

This so-called “school” refers to a group of artists who painted gritty, vital views of many strata of New York City life in the early twentieth century.

Yet there’s a problem: the Ashcan School was not only never literally a “school,” but it also never consisted of an organized group of artists. Because of this, to my mind, it seems more reasonable to use the term “Ashcan School” to refer to works that fit certain criteria associated with this school rather than to try to assign this label to certain artists. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Research. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.