This painting gives the viewer a bird's eye perspective looking down on Lower Manhattan from above. This high vantage point makes the buildings, streets and people below seem small, giving a feeling of looking down on an intricate model cityscape. The energetic brushwork and bright colors also make the scene feel lively and active when viewed from above. Overall, Marin's unique aerial perspective imbues the painting with a feeling of dynamism and movement.

1. HUM16 Arts
& Ideas:
American
Culture
PROGRESSIVE ERA –
ART IN URBAN
AMERICAN

2. Progressive Era: 1890s-1920s;
era of U.S. history when reformers tried to clean up
problems created during the Gilded Age
Industrialization led to
a rise in urbanization,
immigration, poverty,
and dangerous
working conditions
City, state, and federal
governments were
seen as corrupt
Corporate monopolies
limited competition
and workers’ wages

3. 1. Progressive Era: 1890s-1920s
 By 1890s:
 Wealthy had immense political power
 Huge gap b/t rich & poor (9% of
Americans had 75% of wealth)
 2015: 5% of Americans had 89% of wealth
 Wealthy flaunted wealth (“gilded”)
 Industrial workers’ working & living
conditions
Working: long hours, low wages,
dangerous work (corporate
monopolies)
Living: slums

4.  Christian “Social Gospel” movement
 Salvation Army: created nurseries &
soup kitchens
 YMCA: libraries & gyms for men &
children
 Development of settlement houses
(as opposed to slums)
 Muckraking: investigative journalism to
expose societal ills
2. Contributing factors to reform

5. 3. Jacob Riis, photographer, journalist, muckraker:
How the Other Half Lives (1890)
America: The Story of Us
Jacob Riis video
Jacob Riis’ How the Other
Half Lives (1890) exposed
urban poverty and life in
the slums

6. 4. Four Goals of Reformers
 1) Protect the Social Welfare
 i.e., governmental provision of economic assistance to
persons in need
 2) Promote Moral Improvement
 i.e., changes in character
 3) Create Economic Reform
 i.e., government change in policies toward businesses
 4) Foster Efficiency
 i.e., effective use of resources

7. 5. Progressive Era’s mixed results
 Problem: Poor working/living conditions for working class
 Solution: unions worked for safety laws, child labor laws, & limiting
length of work day; food safety laws
 Problem: rampant alcoholism & alcohol abuse led to workplace
accidents, loss of employment, domestic abuse
 Solution: 18th amendment passed in 1919 (Prohibition)
 Repealed: 21st amendment in 1933
 Problem: Women’s inequality/discrimination – especially as many
(white women) entered paid workforce
 Solution: 19th amendment passed in 1920 (women’s suffrage)
 Problem: Racism, Jim Crow
 Solution: ¯_(ツ)_/¯ until 1960s
Excerpt from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle:
“…old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white – it would be
dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again
for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in
the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of
consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the
water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about
on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his
hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats.
These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them;
they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers
together… the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the
shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one – there were
things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a
tidbit.”
Text of the 18th amendment:
Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture,
sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof
into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory
subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to
enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as
an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as
provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the
submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

8. 6a. Progressivism  Art
 realism: mid-19th-early 20th-c. movement in art &
architecture attempting to portray things as they are
 Rejection of romanticism
 No avoidance of “unpleasant” aspects of life
 Emphasis on everyday life & events – “ordinary life”
 modernism: primarily 19th-20th-c. movements in art &
architecture rooted in the transformation of a post-industrial
society
 self-expression: individualism & agency
 rejection of realism
 embrace of technology
 emphasis on progress (rejection of tradition)
Modernism in philosophy: multiple
philosophical movements
• thought to begin with Descartes
(17th-c.)
• Includes humanism (individualism,
agency, & rationality) & emphasis on
objective truth
Modernism v. Modernity

9. 6b. Progressivism  Art
 Question: What do you think is the relationship between the Progressive era
politics/reform and the art movements that were around at the time (realism
and modernism)?
 Muckraking – attempting to shed light on reality of daily life
 Social upheaval and change affects art, not just politics
 Reform allowed greater access to education (and likewise art) to more than just the
wealthy

10. 7. Realism: Ashcan School
 Characteristics:
 Gritty, urban scenes: finds beauty in
the ugly
 Portrays life in urban areas
 Documents day-to-day life
 Traces process of Americanization of
immigrants
 Rejects romanticism (genteel portraits;
landscapes, etc.)

11. 8. Robert Henri: Ashcan Realist
 Born: 1865; Died: 1929 – Midwest
 Shot & killed a rancher (had physical
dispute w/his father)
 Moved to Philadelphia to attend
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine arts
 Eventually settled in NYC
 Began as impressionist, but ultimately
rejected it as “academic”
 Wanted to create something new
(Ashcan School):
 Art as journalism
 Not romanticized
Salome (1909):
*dancer (Henri hired a dancer to
perform “dance of the 7 veils” in
order to paint it
*”affront” to conservatives
-strutting (proud)
-bare midriff, legs, barefeet
-exotic (stereotypes?)
-haughty facial expression

12. 9. George Bellows: Ashcan Realist
 Born: 1882; Died: 1925 –
Midwestern
 Became student of Robert Henri /
Ashcan Realist
 Excavation of Penn Station
(1907):

13. 10. George Bellows: Boxing Paintings
 Question: What stands out to you in these paintings? What makes them
different?
 What about them could we say is “American”?

14. 11. John Sloan: Ashcan Realist
 Born: 1871 (Pennsylvania); Died: 1951
 Parents: mother was a schoolteacher; father eventually
unable to work b/c of mental illness
 Studied under Thomas Anschutz; eventually Robert
Henri became his mentor
 Struggled financially as an artist; worked as a freelancer
to make money
 Artistic style:
 Subjects often people in urban areas (New York)
 Perspective: often through windows (“unsuspecting”
subject – intimate)
 “Spectator of life” – not violent, like Bellows
 Attempted to avoid “conscious” propaganda (he was a
socialist)

15. 12. Sloan’s Election Night
 Energetic painting – crowd is
active; train is moving
 quick brush strokes
 dabs of color/light in an
otherwise dark painting
 Focal point: people, not place
 New Yorkers aren’t
“stereotypes of misery”

16. 13. Marcel Duchamp: French-American
Modernist
 Born: 1887 (France); Died: 1968.
 Became American citizen in 1955
 Modernist artist (painter, sculptor)
 Cubism, Dada, conceptual art
 Coined term “anti-art” – challenge
to accepted notions of what ”art”
is
The Fountain (1917)
Cubism: subject matter is broken apart
& reassembled in abstract way
• often to see different perspectives
of the same subject
• E.g., superimposed on each
other
Dada: avant-garde movement of artists
who rejected logic & aesthetics of
modern capitalism  focused on
irrational or nonsensical
Conceptual: idea behind art >
technique/aesthetic quality (e.g.,
readymades)

17. 14. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
 Debuted at Armory Show (Alfred Stieglitz)
 Cubist
 Demonstrates Duchamp’s focus on capturing time as
the 4th dimension in visual art
 Limited color (brown/beige)
 Based on sequential photos (studying
movement)
 Not well-received by either art critics/elite (who
didn’t like modernism) or even other Cubists
 Duchamp’s work represents problem of the “truly
new”
 Must be scorned before accepted

18. 15. Joseph Stella: Italian-American Futurist-
Modernist
 Born: 1877 (Italy); Died: 1946
 Background: middle-class Italian family
 Came to NYC to study medicine; abandoned
medicine for art
 Contemporary of Stieglitz, Duchamp, & others
from the Armory Show
 Style:
 Futurist; Precisionist
 Geometric: defined shapes
(e.g., based on Lower Manhattan’s architecture)
 Colorful, with sweeping lines
Futurist:
• avant-garde; rejection of
tradition/the old
• light often painted as a “force”
(beam)
Precisionist:
• 1st indigenous American art
movement
• celebrates industry (skyscrapers,
bridges, factories)
• Themes: industrialization;
modernization
• “Cubist-realism”
• Influenced advertising art, pop art

19. 16. Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge paintings
 Question: What do you see
in these paintings? What do
they highlight, and what
might that say about this era
in American history?
• City framed in gothic arches; colors like
stained glass: new focal point/gods:
industry, technology, business, profit,
progress
• Perspective/lines: forward motion
• Optimism about future?

20. 17. John Marin: American Modernist
 Born: 1870; Died: 1953.
 Mother died after childbirth; raised by aunts in NJ
 Attended Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
 Studied with Thomas Anschutz
 Exhibited in Stieglitz’s gallery first in 1909
 Exhibited in Armory Show
 Style:
 Abstract – influenced later Abstract Expressionists
 Light, color – energetic
 Use of negative space – bare canvas

21. 18. Marin’s Lower
Manhattan from the
Woolworth (1922)
 Question: How does the
perspective of this painting
make you, the viewer, feel?
How would you characterize
his style here?
 Energy
 Perspective  non-linear
 “explosive; toppling”
Disjointed/dissociative
 Sparse use of color

22. 19. Charles Sheeler: American Modernist &
Precisionist
 Born: 1883; Died: 1965.
 Grew up in Pennsylvania – attended Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts
 Intrigued by cubism
 Photographer & painter
 Hired by Ford Motor Co. to photograph/paint
factories
 Process: photograph  drawing  painting
 Developed art movement: Precisionism
 Style:
 Landscapes, but not pastorals (nature)  factories

23. 20. Sheeler’s American Landscape (1930)
 Question: How is Sheeler’s work different from Marin’s or Stella’s? What might we learn
about Sheeler’s picture of America at this time?
• Blurs line between human-
made & nature
• E.g., smoke/clouds;
machinery/river reflection
• But: human is small (one tiny
man) in face of
machinery/nature