The artists now know as the Ashcan school--Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Bellows, George Luks, John Sloan and Everett Shinn--depicted New York's street life and popular entertainment in the early twentieth century. Their sketch-like style is generally considered a spontaneous response to "life in the raw," in the tradition of the French impressionists or American realist painting. This dissertation reconsiders that assumption by examining the artists' relationship to conventions for representing New York City in the turn-of-the-century press. By reconstructing the visual environment in which the Ashcan school worked and in which their art was received, the study shows how the artists employed stylistic languages derived from the popular media to create pictures of New York that their contemporaries found compellingly real. Like the images in the press, their work should be seen as an attempt to organize and comprehend the complexity of a modern city.

The Introduction defines the term Ashcan school, describes the group's encounter with turn-of-the-century New York, and compares their approach to contemporary conventions for describing or "picturing" the city. Chapter 1 discusses Robert Henri's teaching, acknowledged by all the artists in the group as an inspiration, in the context of 1890s thought. Chapter 2 recounts the development of American popular journalism and illustrated news, traditions which proved as important in shaping the Ashcan school's vision as Henri's ideas did. The next three chapters link representatives of the Ashcan school to different ways of depicting New York and its problems in the mass media: sensational journalism and sketch-reporting, the genre of magazine writing about "both sides" of the city, images of children and other urban or ethnic "types" in cartoons and comic strips, and realist fiction. The conclusion considers the group's relation to ideas of realism and modernism in twentieth century art. It argues that the Ashcan school's work was so closely associated with contemporary constructions of reality that it lost its specific meaning when photography replaced drawing as the principal medium for conveying visual information in the press.