New York Realists

At the turn of the Century and in the years that immediately followed, when John Singer Sargent was painting socialite portraits in the British manner, Henry James was preaching the superiority of European civilization, and Architect Stanford White felt that a copy of a Spanish Cathedral's bell tower was the proper thing for a horse show and prizefight auditorium, a few U. S. artists began discovering the American Scene. Many of them were born in Philadelphia, most of them were influenced by the earlier painting of Philadelphia's Thomas Eakins, all of them lived and worked in New York and within the past decade all of them have won much fame.

Last week the Whitney Museum of American Art honored these men with an exhibition entitled "New York Realists, 1900-1914." Nine were chosen: Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, George Bellows, Everett Shinn, Glenn O. Coleman, Guy Pene DuBois. Of this lot Artists Henri, Luks, Glackens, Shinn and Sloan were trained in Philadelphia. All but Henri, Luks, Bellows and Coleman were still alive and painting hard.

Because the work of all these men is very well known, the Whitney Museum went to great pains to see that the pictures and drawings honoring them should be comparatively new to the Manhattan art world. Pride of the museum is George Bellows' great canvas of the Dempsey-Firpo fight. Because it had been shown so many times, it was not included in the present exhibition. Borrowed from the Cleveland Museum to take its place was the equally important Stag at Sharkey's. So with the other artists: whenever possible, paintings and drawings were borrowed from collections which the public seldom sees.

It was confusing for gallery-goers last week to realize that six of the nine Realists were once members of a group that called itself The Eight,* and was formed about 1908 to show these paintings which academicians of the time were regarding with all the horror that their descendants now save for rabid surrealists. Though they were ardently in favor of their associates' ambition to paint the New York life that surrounded them, Artists Arthur B. Davies and Maurice Prendergast never painted that sort of picture. They were thus omitted from last week's show and their places taken by three of Robert Henri's ablest pupils : Bellows, Glenn Coleman, Guy Pene Dubois.

Even harder was it for young gallery-goers to realize the excitement and opposition that these pictures caused when they were first painted. The Eight were not interested in either technical or political experiments. George Luks, for example, had a larger capacity for beer and a greater ingenuity at general hell-raising than almost any Greenwich Villager before or since. Yet the two little girls dancing to a barrel organ in last week's show, or the puzzled baby watching her bald father play the guitar, are blameless bits of conservative painting. The mere fact, 30 years ago, that these men were attempting to paint the life around them, instead of duchesses in pearls, goddesses in Greek draperies, or New England valleys in a pink mist was enough to deny them admission to most galleries and for the critics of the day to label them the "Ash-can School," the ''Black Gang" and "Apostles of Ugliness."

*Henri, Sloan, Luks, Glackens, Shinn, Davies, Lawson, Prendergast.

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