George Bellows' Cliff Dwellers

In 1913 George Bellows painted a work titled "Cliff Dwellers." Bellows was part of the Ash Can School, a group of artists who were influenced by every-day life and often depicted scenes in urban centers.

On October 12 the Met Museum will open a show called "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915," and Annie Polland, from our education department, has been asked to talk about "Cliff Dwellers" for the exhibit's audio tour.

Annie will give her thoughts on the painting's content based on what she knows about Lower East Side social and cultural history. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the painting is housed, says, "A large part of the work’s attraction to students of American history has been the fact that it appears to stand out among Ash Can school paintings as a statement of strong social criticism."

What do you think about this painting?

From the Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

- Posted by Kate Stober

Rebecca Lepkoff Photographs

Few things capture turn-of-the-century life on the Lower East Side better than art, which we'll explore in this week's series.

Born in the Lower East Side in 1916, photographer Rebecca Lepkoff kept her camera trained on the neighborhood for over six decades, charting its gradual shift from melting pot to hipster hot spot. Early in her career, Lepkoff joined the progressive (and eventually black-listed ) Photo League, a group of New York shutterbugs that captured, like the Ashcan artists decades before them, the gritty realities of urban street life. Her classic black and white snapshots of the el train, tenement buildings, and mothers with baby carriages are featured in the book Life On the Lower East Side, and were on display for a while at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in SoHo, where visitors could ask to see rare original prints. The gallery's collection still includes works by a number of famous 20th century New York artists, including Jacob Riis.






A Lepkoff photo from the 1940s. Baby carriages were as common a sight on New York's streets back then as they are now.

Art in the Lower East Side: Ashcan Paintings

What was life really like on the Lower East Side over 100 years ago? The artifacts in our collection are great tools for piecing things together, but few things give a better overview than turn-of-the-century paintings, photographs, and films, which we'll explore in this week's series.

The Ashcan school of painting was controversial back in 1908 for the same reason it's so valuable to historians today: it exposed the seedy side of life on the Lower East Side, shocking wealthy New Yorkers who preffered to keep the city's squalor out of sight and out of mind. The turn of the century saw an explosion in progressive muckraking, with journalists like Jacob Riis using newspaper articles and photographs to win reforms for the working-class. What was most revolutionary about the eight founders of the Ashcan school (named for the gritty subjects of their paintings) was the tools they used to conduct their journalistic endeavors: paintbrushes and canvases rather than paper, pen, and camera. Following the motto "art for life's sake," the artists peeked into the saloons, rear yards, and alleyways east of the Bowery, producing works like the following:

Cliff Dwellers, by George Bellows

Six O'Clock, Winter by John Sloan

Dempsey and Firpo, by George Bellows