Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School

The book is divided into two main parts. In the three chapters that compose the book's first part ("The Setting"), Zurier fleshes out the historical context of Ashcan art and sets up her historical and theoretical framework. In the second ("The Artists"), she moves on to scrutinize the practices of individual figures in the Ashcan group. One of the effects of her thematic focus is a shift in the relative significance that certain artists are afforded in her account. For instance, Henri seems somewhat diminished here. Certainly, his pivotal role as teacher and prime mover is left in place (although even this is due, I think, for further historical revision). Yet the concentration here on urban looking in some ways casts Henri as the odd man out. Although most texts on the Ashcan school obligatorily reproduce one of his New York street scenes, these were in retrospect a relatively small part of his output. Henri was primarily a portraitist and figure painter, and he seems to have been more focused on art of the past--especially old masters like Frans Hals and Diego Velazquez--than were his colleagues. Zurier's analysis also calls attention to certain problematic features of Henri's art, notably, his emphasis on a picturesque view of the poor and the marginalized. She points out that while Henri used rhetoric that espoused the dignity of the individual, his quest for the elusive quality of "authenticity" meant that many of his character studies of particular racial or ethnic types--Native Americans, gypsies, the Irish--often draw on the stock pictorial conventions of racial and ethnic caricature.

As Zurier moves past teacher and mentor Henri to discuss figures like Shinn and Glackens, her study further differentiates itself from earlier approaches to the same subject. In Metropolitan Lives, as in other comparable contextualist accounts, period pictorial documentation had been used mainly to show how similar urban subjects (scenes of popular entertainment, ethnic types) were treated in contemporaneous popular imagery like cartoons and advertisements. These are certainly on offer in Picturing the City. What's different here is that the archival record is mined not just for evidence of shared subject matter but also for documentation of different technical methods of picture making. For instance, in order to help us better understand the work of Shinn, who like many of his colleagues had started his career as a newspaper sketch artist, Zurier considers the history of journalistic illustration up to that point, with careful attention to improvements in printing technology and the evolving visual rhetoric of documentary reportage. As Zurier points out, "Shinn developed his signature style during a period of change in news illustration, when the static diagram gave way to an aesthetic of movement and a new presence for sketch artists" (p. 144). In contrast to earlier periods, in which illustrations were generally anonymous, the autographic, eyewitness visual account of the newspaper sketch artist now came to the fore.