“It’s really about city workers that would clear the streets of New York,” Maciejunes says. She points to Snow Dumpers, a 1911 oil painting of workers dumping snow into New York City’s East River, as a valuable document of early 20th century life. “What’s so memorable about so many of the pictures is this idea of trying to capture American life,” Maciejunes says, “particularly American life in New York.” Despite capturing the sometimes-rugged realities of life at the time, the Ashcan School generally avoided overt political messages.
The artists’ work favored city scenes and crowded streets.
The cohort’s name came from a Bellows drawing titled Disappointments of the Ash Can, which some criticized for the raw view of life it depicted. The Ashcan artists – including Robert Henri, William Glackens and George Luks – focused on realistic paintings that captured the realities of urban and lower-class life in America. He was really one of the most talented painters of his generation.”ĬMA has long been home to the world’s largest collection of Bellows’ works, but the George Bellows Center, supported by the Teckie and Don Shackelford family, will solidify the museum as a center of scholarship and study related to the artist and the Ashcan School movement that he was part of. “Bellows was part of the revolutionary, groundbreaking generation of American artists that led the charge in both realism and modernism. “He’s a hometown boy,” says Nannette Maciejunes, director of the museum. Now, the Columbus Museum of Art has created a home for his art right where it all began. The Columbus-born artist and one-time student of The Ohio State University made a name for himself after moving to New York City, where he documented American life without the filters of the aristocracy. At the beginning of the 20th century, when the influence of impressionism and its smeared images of French landscapes still dominated the art world, George Bellows was focusing on real life.
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