Ashcan Art Whiteness and the Unspectacular Man

<p>Arriving in New York City in the first decade of the twentieth century six painters faced a visual culture that depicted the urban man as a diseased body under assault. Robert Henri John Sloan Everett Shinn Glackens George Luks and George Bellows-subsequently known as the Ashcan Circle-countered this narrative manipulating the bodies of construction workers tramps entertainers and office workers to stand in visual opposition to popular political and commercial cultures. They did so by repeatedly positioning white male bodies as having no cleverness no moral authority no style and no particular charisma crafting with consistency an <i>unspectacular </i>man. This was an attempt both radical and deeply insidious to make the white male body stand outside visual systems of knowledge to resist the disciplining powers of commercial capitalism and to simply be with no justification or rationale. <p/><i>Ashcan Art Whiteness and the Unspectacular Man</i> maps how Ashcan artists reconfigured urban masculinity for national audiences and reimagined the possibility and privilege of the unremarkable white male body thus shaping dialogues about modernity gender and race that shifted visual culture in the United States.</p>