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28-556: 4th Street is a street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. 4th Street or Fourth Street may also refer to: 4th Street (Manhattan) The north/south portion (from Sixth Avenue to 13th Street) was formerly called Asylum Street , after the Orphan Asylum Society, which stood on Asylum Street between Bank Street and Troy Street (now West 12th Street). The asylum was demolished in 1833 and

56-486: A cafe in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Judson Memorial Church , located at the corner of Thompson Street and Washington Square South, was designed by architect Stanford White and stained glass master John La Farge . The West Fourth Street subway station ( A ​, B ​, C ​, D ​, E ​, F , <F> ​, and M trains) at Sixth Avenue

84-563: A determination to create a type of art that engaged with life. He attempted to imbue several other artists with this passion. The school has even been referred to as "the revolutionary black gang", a reference to the artists' dark palette . The group was subject to attacks in the press and one of their earliest exhibitions, in 1908 at New York's Macbeth Gallery , was a success. Since then to 1913, they would go on to participate in several key exhibitions of progressive art in New York. Many of

112-671: A large number of painters beyond the original "Philadelphia Five," including George Bellows , Glenn O. Coleman, Jerome Myers , Gifford Beal , Eugene Higgins, Carl Sprinchorn and Edward Hopper . (Despite his inclusion in the group by some critics, Hopper rejected their focus and never embraced the label; his depictions of city streets were painted in a different spirit, "with not a single incidental ashcan in sight.") Photographers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine were also discussed as Ashcan artists. Like many art-historical terms, "Ashcan art" has sometimes been applied to so many different artists that its meaning has become diluted. The artists of

140-734: A more diverse, adventurous quality than the Academy generally permitted. When the exhibition closed in New York, where it attracted considerable attention, it toured Chicago, Toledo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Bridgeport, and Newark in a traveling show organized by John Sloan. Reviews were mixed, but interest was high. ("Big Sensation at the Art Museum, Visitors Join Throng Museum and Join Hot Discussion," one Ohio newspaper noted.) As art historian Judith Zilczer summarized

168-695: A room in the Studio Club building to complete the series of articles that became his account of the Bolshevik Revolution , Ten Days That Shook the World , later the source for the film Reds . Sculptor and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney established the Whitney Studio Club in a brownstone at 147 West 4th Street in 1918 as a place for young artists to gather and show their work. The facility operated for ten years and

196-522: Is in a complaint found in a radical socialist publication called The Masses in March 1916 by the cartoonist Art Young, alleging that there were too many "pictures of ashcans and girls hitching up their skirts on Horatio Street." That particular reference was published in The Masses at a point at which the artists had already been working together for several years. They were amused by the reference and

224-533: Is one of the major transfer points in the New York City Subway . The street is home to the basketball and handball West Fourth Street Courts , known as "The Cage", a hangout for some of New York's best basketball players and the site of a citywide streetball tournament. West 4th Street has always been a center of the Village's bohemian lifestyle. The Village's first tearoom, The Mad Hatter,

252-603: The Philadelphia School of Design for Women , was also a part of the Ashcan School. She was friends with many of its better-known members, including Sloan with whom she co-founded the Society of Independent Artists . The movement, which took some inspiration from Walt Whitman 's epic poem Leaves of Grass , has been seen as emblematic of the spirit of political rebellion of the period. The Ashcan School

280-470: The "Peace Church" for its support of Vietnam War protesters, Washington Square Church long provided a neighborhood base for activist groups such as the Black Panthers and Gay Men's Health Crisis . The church was sold in 2005 to a developer for conversion into residential units. During construction, parts of the church were salvaged to form the furniture and interior architecture of Urban Spring,

308-621: The 1968 hippie candidate for the presidency, had his artists' studio and campaign headquarters at 129 East 4th St. Music venue The Bottom Line was at 15th West 4th Street from 1974 to 2004. Ashcan School The Ashcan School , also called the Ash Can School , was an artistic movement in the United States during the late 19th-early 20th century that produced works portraying scenes of daily life in New York , often in

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336-518: The Ashcan School rebelled against both American Impressionism and academic realism, the two most respected and commercially successful styles in the US at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In contrast to the highly polished work of artists like John Singer Sargent , William Merritt Chase , Kenyon Cox , Thomas Wilmer Dewing , and Abbott Thayer , Ashcan works were generally darker in tone and more roughly painted. Many captured

364-432: The area of print publication at a time before photography replaced hand-drawn illustrations in newspapers. They were involved in journalistic pictorial reportage before concentrating their energies on painting. George Luks once proclaimed "I can paint with a shoestring dipped in pitch and lard." In the mid-1890s Robert Henri returned to Philadelphia from Paris very unimpressed by the work of the late Impressionists and with

392-507: The attention accorded the group's well-publicized exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in New York 1908 was such that Ashcan art gained wider exposure and greater sales and critical attention than it had known before. The Macbeth Galleries exhibition was held to protest the restrictive exhibition policies of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design and to broadcast the need for wider opportunities to display new art of

420-601: The city's poorer neighborhoods. The artists working in this style included Robert Henri (1865–1929), George Luks (1867–1933), William Glackens (1870–1938), John Sloan (1871–1951), and Everett Shinn (1876–1953). Some of them met studying together under the renowned realist Thomas Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts ; others met in the newspaper offices of Philadelphia where they worked as illustrators. Theresa Bernstein , who studied at

448-463: The group known as "The Eight", though in fact only five members of that group (Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, and Shinn) were Ashcan artists. The other three – Arthur B. Davies , Ernest Lawson , and Maurice Prendergast – painted in a very different style, and the exhibition that brought "The Eight" to national attention took place in 1908, several years after the beginning of the Ashcan style. However,

476-731: The harsher moments of modern life, portraying street kids (e.g., Henri's Willie Gee and Bellows' Paddy Flannagan ), prostitutes (e.g., Sloan's The Haymarket and Three A.M. ), alcoholics (e.g., Luks' The Old Duchess ), indecorous animals (e.g., Luks' Feeding the Pigs and Woman with Goose ), subways (e.g., Shinn's Sixth Avenue Elevated After Midnight ), crowded tenements (e.g., Bellows' Cliff Dwellers ), washing hung out to dry (Shinn's The Laundress and Sloan's A Woman's Work ), boisterous theaters (e.g., Glackens' Hammerstein's Roof Garden and Shinn's London Hippodrome ), bloodied boxers (e.g., Bellows' Both Members of This Club ), and wrestlers on

504-528: The mat (e.g., Luks' The Wrestlers ). It was their frequent, although not exclusive, focus upon poverty and the gritty realities of urban life that prompted some critics and curators to consider them too unsettling for mainstream audiences and collections. The advent of modernism in the United States spelled the end of the Ashcan school's provocative reputation. With the Armory Show of 1913 and

532-408: The most famous Ashcan works were painted in the first decade of the century at the same time in which the realist fiction of Stephen Crane , Theodore Dreiser , and Frank Norris was finding its audience and the muckraking journalists were calling attention to slum conditions. The first known use of the term "ash can art" is credited to artist Art Young in 1916. The term by that time was applied to

560-493: The name soon lost its negative connotations. The Ashcan School of artists had also been known as "The Apostles of Ugliness". The term Ashcan School was originally applied in derision. The school is not so much known for innovations in technique but more for its subject matter. Common subjects were prostitutes and street urchins. The work of the Ashcan painters links them to such documentary photographers as Jacob Riis and Lewis W. Hine . Several Ashcan School painters derived from

588-404: The opening of more galleries in the 1910s promoting the work of Cubists , Fauves , and Expressionists , Henri and his circle began to appear tame to a younger generation. Their rebellion was over not long after it began. It was the fate of the Ashcan realists to be seen by many art lovers as too radical in 1910 and, by many more, as old-fashioned by 1920. The Ashcan school is sometimes linked to

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616-437: The street was renamed West 4th Street. Later, the cross streets (Amos, Hammond, and Troy) were renamed West 10th, 11th, and 12th Streets, causing the current confusion. Located near Washington Square Park's south-west corner, between MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue , The Washington Square Methodist Church (135 West Fourth) is an early Romanesque Revival marble edifice designed by Gamaliel King and built in 1859–60. Dubbed

644-599: The visual arts. Robert Henri , in some ways the spiritual father of this school, "wanted art to be akin to journalism... he wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter." He urged his younger friends and students to paint in the robust, unfettered, ungenteel spirit of his favorite poet, Walt Whitman , and to be unafraid of offending contemporary taste. He believed that working-class and middle-class urban settings would provide better material for modern painters than drawing rooms and salons. Having been to Paris and admired

672-535: The works of Édouard Manet , Henri also urged his students to ‘’paint the everyday world in America just as it had been done in France.’’ By 1904, all of the artists relocated to New York. The name "Ashcan school" is a tongue-in-cheek reference to other "schools of art". (For examples of other "schools of art" see Category:Italian art movements e.g. Lucchese School and for instance School of Paris .) Its origin

700-476: Was later home to the famous folk club Gerde's Folk City (11 West 4th Street), which hosted the New York debuts of Bob Dylan in 1961 and Simon & Garfunkel . Dylan also lived from early-1962 until late-1964 in a small $ 60-per-month studio apartment at 161 West 4th Street; the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was photographed at nearby Jones Street at West 4th, and the street may have inspired his 1965 hit song " Positively 4th Street ". Louis Abolafia ,

728-555: Was located at 150 West 4th Street and served as a meeting place for intellectuals and artists. The infamous Golden Swan bar (known as the "Hell Hole"), at the corner of Sixth Avenue, was a famous haunt of Eugene O'Neill and the setting and inspiration for his play The Iceman Cometh . Writer Willa Cather 's first New York residence was at 60 Washington Square South (4th Street between LaGuardia Place and Thompson Place) and radical journalists John Reed and Lincoln Steffens lived nearby at 42 Washington Square South. Reed later worked in

756-490: Was not an organized movement. The artists who worked in this style did not issue manifestos or even see themselves as a unified group with identical intentions or career goals. Some of the artists were politically minded, and others were apolitical. Their unity consisted of a desire to tell certain truths about the city and modern life they felt had been ignored by the suffocating influence of the Genteel Tradition in

784-531: Was the second incarnation of what would later become the Whitney Museum of American Art . It started the careers of such artists as Ashcan School painter John Sloan , Edward Hopper , whose first one-man exhibit was held there in 1920, and social realists Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop . Sloan lived at 240 West 4th St and painted locations on the street including the Golden Swan. The street

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