A Knock-Out Show

As "Life's Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists' Brush with Leisure, 1895–1925," at the New-York Historical Society through February 10, attests, a small group of painters defined for future generations the look and feel of a whole period of New York's history. When we think of McSorley's Bar on East 7th Street, we tend not to think of it as it is, but as it was painted, by John Sloan and especially by George Luks. (Both paintings are in this show.) The infamous Tenderloin district, centered on Sixth Avenue in the 20s and 30s, resonates for us less from verbal than from painterly descriptions of it. When Mark Helprin wrote his "magic realist" novel of New York history, "Winter's Tale" (1984), he seemed to base much of it on the Ashcan artists' New York. Among that novel's settings, the restaurants Mouquin's and Petipas feature in memorable images from the current show.

The Ashcan artists were so called because they chose to depict the banalities of urban life — as one critic put it, such things as ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts. While there aren't many ash cans in the Ashcan artists' works, there are plenty of girls hitching up their skirts, especially in depictions of leisure activities. The show divides into five sections: Dining Out, Entertainment: Fine and Performing Arts, Parks and Public Spaces, Beaches and the Outdoors, and Sports. Each section's paintings are supplemented by period ephemera (menus, programs, etc.) or objects, and by silent film reels, including two made by Thomas Edison — "Tenderloin at Night" from 1899, and "Rube and Mandy at Coney Island" from 1903.

"Dining Out" features several of the Ashcan images most etched upon our minds: Everett Shinn's "The Bar at McSorley's" (1908), William Glackens's "Chez Mouquin" (1905), and John Sloan's "Yeats at Petipas'" (1910, the Yeats in question being the poet's father, John Butler). The best-painted picture in this section is Maurice Prendergast's "The Band Concert, Luxembourg Gardens" of 1893 (not all the images are of New York), but perhaps the most arresting image is George Luks's "The Café Francis" (c. 1906), showing James B. Moore, the café's proprietor, lasciviously removing a young woman's wrap. Her smile indicates that she, too, finds this a pleasurable routine — or at least wishes for the man to believe she does. The way the two figures overpower the frame has an in-yourface sexual indelicacy that calls to mind Manet's "Bar at the Folies-Bergère," or Sargent's "Madame X." Speaking of Manet, his spirit imbues Glackens's "Chez Mouquin," in which Mme. Mouquin shares a table with the aforementioned Mr. Moore, about whom let's only say I'd let no daughter of mine within a mile of that guy.

The tutelary force behind Ashcanism was Robert Henri, whose most compelling pictures are his full-length portraits. In the "Entertainment" section we see his "Salome" (1909), which he painted after seeing Richard Strauss's 1905 opera at the Manhattan Opera House in 1909, and "Ruth St. Denis in the Peacock Dance," from 1919. My favorite in this section is Everett Shinn's "Theatre Scene" (c. 1906–07), with its footlighted whites onstage above the black backs of the audience members. I was also much taken with Eugene Speicher's portrait of Katharine Cornell as Shaw's "Candida" (c. 1925–26), which is placed beside a Malvina Hoffman plaster bust of the actress from 1961.

"Parks and Public Spaces" contains several of the show's most interesting works. "Twilight on the Harlem" (c. 1907) by Arthur B. Davies, in which High Bridge, a dreamy moon, and tiny fairylike figures crowding the bottom edge form an image of urban enchantment, is one of the best works by that artist. Luks, in "Winter — Highbridge" (1912), made in the year he and his wife moved to the Bronx, "represented his new neighborhood as a winter playland for children," as the wall text states. It's as enchanting as the Davies. Glackens's "The Battery" (c. 1902–04) is welcome as one of the few paintings ever made of New York Harbor, a magnificent subject that never received its due.

It's in this section that the show poses the question: How good were these painters, anyway? Do we value their works as social documents or as art? Though I like the big three — Sloan, Henri, and especially Glackens — none seems to me a giant of American painting. The best painter here by far is Prendergast. We see it in his Luxembourg Gardens picture in the first section, and in his "In Central Park" (c. 1900-03) in this section. Technically, he was one of the most dazzling watercolorists who ever lived. His crowd pictures, rendered in watercolor, represent an achievement that is probably unique in Western art. In this section, we also happily see Leon Kroll, an underrated painter and the only one, in my experience, who ever accurately represented the topography of Central Park. (Prendergast saw Central Park as a place to find the moving crowds he loved, not as a place of topographical fascination.) A fine Kroll also hangs in the "Beaches and the Outdoors" section: "In the Country" (1916) shows this painter's unerring sense of composition.

Kroll was a friend of George Bellows who, had he not died so tragically young, might have achieved far more than the impressive output he was able to cram into his 43 years. His boxing pictures, such as "Club Night" (1907) and, especially, "Dempsey and Firpo" of 1924, are justly famous. Jack Dempsey fought Luis Firpo at the Polo Grounds in September 1923, and Bellows sat in the front, sketching the event for the New York Evening Journal. His image of Firpo punching Dempsey out of the ring has such an immediacy coupled with a superb sense of structure that the painting can't help being the highlight of this wonderful exhibition.

Until February 10 (170 Central Park West at 77th Street, 212-873-3400).