NEWS and EVENTS
Tuesday, November 12, 2019 6:30pm
Millennia Atlantic University
3801 NW 97th Avenue
Doral, Florida
Session presented by Hollander curator
Dr. Andrew Gottlieb
The Ashcan School and American Impressionism
Two great and divergent American narratives arise between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The actors in each could not have been more dissimilar.
American industrialists, and those who rose into wealth along with them, tended to favor an idyllic, if not dated, view of American life. They were explicit regarding how this belief should be expressed through art and painting. This community was educated and wealthy. They vacationed in he mountains, seaside, and countryside; nearly all were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Pastoral in focus, with the influence of French Impressionism, the movement echoed the earlier Hudson River School, with sweeping landscapes and bright colors, all glorifying a manifest destiny certitude, with regard to expansion into the pristine West.
During the same period, some twenty-five million immigrants came to the cities of the Eastern Seaboard. They arrived poor; they were Catholic and Jewish, and their reality was tenement life in the increasingly industrial cities.
Robert Henri and John Sloan, tongue-in-cheek, collaborated with others to create the "Ashcan School," whose artistic goal was to reflect changing American realities "real as mud."
The movement, with surprising beauty, even dazzle, reflected daily life in the new urban setting, in earth tones, shadow, artificial light. An often somber mood, depicting the strident new challenges of tenement life and factory labor, spoke to a new American reality, and invited bitter rejection by the academy, and particularly the university.
Join us to discuss and view related works, and how they relate to current debates about urban life and nature.
We are proud to announce our alliance with the Florida Association of Museums, as well as our acquisition of AdLib Museum Software for Non-Profit Organizations, made available to us through its parent company--AXIELL: Archives, Museums, and Libaries.
Over the next few months, student interns will be transfering all of our archival data to this format. AdLib is the most widely used collection management software in the world, and will facilitate Hollander Collection cooperation with related museums and collections in the larger material culture community, particularly through The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU (JMOF-FIU) https://jmof.fiu.edu/.
