Picturing the City

"Picturing the City takes a look at the group of urban realists known as the Ashcan School and at the booming cultures of vision and representation in early-twentieth-century New York. Offering insights into the development of modern cities and modern art in America, Rebecca Zurier considers what it meant to live in a city where strangers habitually watched each other and public life seemed to consist of continual display, as new classes of immigrants and working women claimed their places in the metropolis. Through her study of six artists - George Bellows, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan - Zurier illuminates the quest for new forms of realism to describe changes in urban life, commercial culture, and codes of social conduct in the early 1900s."--Jacket.