ashcan school

American  

noun

(often initial capital letters)

1. a group of American painters of the early 20th century whose genre paintings were derived from city life.

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Example Sentences

But Henri and the painters of the Ashcan School he established were looking for an antidote to the hygienic, idealized art taught in the academies, and they relished wrapping themselves in a musky, deodorant-free rhetoric.

From Washington Post

I studied paintings by George Bellows, and the Ashcan school of painting was an inspiration.

From Salon

The artist Robert Henri, who taught there before Neel arrived, was an enduring influence; Henri was a proponent of the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century movement that rejected the gauzy gesturalism of Impressionism in favor of a more straightforward realism.

From New York Times

Just as the Ashcan School of artists captured the beauty of the metropolitan mundane in their brushstrokes, Smith does so in her inexhaustible descriptions of what urban activist Jane Jacobs immortally called “the ballet of the streets”: kids playing a game of “Stachers!” on the pavement; neighbors across the alley yelling at Margy’s arguing parents: “Shut your windows or shut your traps!”

From Washington Post

In his teens and after he made creditable sketches and watercolors of New York, mostly in a style aligned with Ashcan School realism.

From New York Times