ART: THE EPIC OF THE CITY

UNTIL ABOUT 1880, THE ACCEPTed epic subject of American painting was the Western frontier. By 1900 this had slid into nostalgia; it was no longer in synch with social reality. Most Americans lived in cities, and the myth of the West was just that: a myth, however durable. The real frontier was urban--a place of hitherto unimagined overcrowding, of cultural collision enforced by huge-scale immigration, of rapid change, where class ground against class like the imperfect rollers of a giant machine. Its epitome was New York City--Bagdad-on-the-Subway, as the writer O. Henry called it--a city in convulsive and continuous transition, bursting at the seams with high spirits, misery and spectacle.

The painters who reported on it were nicknamed the Ashcan School by a critic in the 1930s, and the label has stuck. They were Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens and George Bellows, and among them they created the first art of urban America. The current show at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, "Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York," is a fine introduction to their work.

The group had formed around Henri in Philadelphia. Henri's original family name was Cozad--he was a very distant relation of Mary Cassatt--but his father, a riverboat gambler and property shark, had shot a man in Nebraska and had moved East and changed his name to escape the judge and jury. Young Henri (pronounced Hen-rye) became an artist through study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which in the 1880s was still what its chief teacher, the great realist Thomas Eakins, had made it: the best place in America to learn direct, factual realist painting, based on incessant drawing of the naked body.

Henri made a pilgrimage to Paris in 1888 and absorbed a fairly academic style of Impressionism during three years of study there. But it was his second trip to Paris in the mid-1890s that confirmed his direction as an artist. Dissatisfied with Impressionism as an art of insubstantial surfaces, he immersed himself in dark tonal painting, based on Manet and Frans Hals. He wanted the image to be not a shimmer of light but a lump in the mind, given urgency by slashing brushstrokes and depth by strong contrast. He liked Hals' vulgarity and reflected it in his portraits, one of the most spectacular of which is in this show--Salome, 1909, a portrait of a dancer known as Mademoiselle Voclezca. Her long leg, thrust out with strutting sexual arrogance and glinting through the overbrushed black veil, had more oomph than a thousand of the virginal Muses and personifications of Columbia painted by academics like Kenyon Cox.