The principles of flight could have been discovered in Europe. But the Wright brothers were raised in that practical culture described by Richard Hofstadter, which played a part in their success. In a similar vein a group of painters later called the Ashcan school, on account of their down-to-earth subject matter, shared a similar pragmatic and reportorial approach to their art. Whereas the cubists, Fauves, and abstractionists concerned themselves with theories of beauty or the fundamentals of reality and matter, the Ashcan school painted the new landscape around them in vivid detail, accurately portraying what was often an ugly world. Their vision (they didn’t really share a style) was laid out at a groundbreaking exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York.57
The leader of the Ashcan school was Robert Henri (1865–1929), descended from French Huguenots who had escaped to Holland during the Catholic massacres of the late sixteenth century.58 Worldly, a little wild, Henri, who visited Paris in 1888, became a natural magnet for other artists in Philadelphia, many of whom worked for the local press: John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks.59 Hard-drinking, poker playing, they had the newspaperman’s eye for detail and a sympathy – sometimes a sentimentality – for the underdog. They met so often they called themselves Henri’s Stock Company.60 Henri later moved to the New York School of Art, where he taught George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Man Ray, and Leon Trotsky. His influence was huge, and his approach embodied the view that the American people should ‘learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time and in their own land.’61
The most typical Ashcan school art was produced by John Sloan (1871–1951), George Luks (1867–1933), and George Bellows (1882–1925). An illustrator for the Masses, a left-wing periodical of social commentary that included John Reed among its contributors, Sloan sought what he called ‘bits of joy’ in New York life, colour plucked from the grim days of the working class: a few moments of rest on a ferry, a girl stretching at the window of a tenement, another woman smelling the washing on the line – all the myriad ways that ordinary people seek to blunt, or even warm, the sharp, cold life at the bottom of the pile.62
George Luks and George Bellows, an anarchist, were harsher, less sentimental.63 Luks painted New York crowds, the teeming congestion in its streets and neighbourhoods. Both he and Bellows frequently represented the boxing and wrestling matches that were such a feature of working-class life and so typical of the raw, naked struggle among the immigrant communities. Here was life on the edge in every way. Although prize fighting was illegal in New York in the 1900s, it nonetheless continued. Bellows’s painting Both Members of This Club, originally entitled A Nigger and a White Man, reflected the concern that many had at the time about the rise of the blacks within sports: ‘If the Negro could beat the white, what did that say about the Master Race?’64 Bellows, probably the most talented painter of the school, also followed the building of Penn Station, the construction of which, by McKim, Mead and White, meant boring a tunnel halfway under Manhattan and the demolition of four entire city blocks between Thirty-first and Thirty-third Streets. For years there was a huge crater in the centre of New York, occupied by steam shovels and other industrial appliances, flames and smoke and hundreds of workmen. Bellows transformed these grimy details into things of beauty.65
The achievement of the Ashcan School was to pinpoint and report the raw side of New York immigrant life. Although at times these artists fixed on fleeting beauty with a generally uncritical eye, their main aim was to show people at the bottom of the heap, not so much suffering, but making the most of what they had. Henri also taught a number of painters who would, in time, become leading American abstractionists.66
At the end of 1903, in the same week that the Wright brothers made their first flight, and just two blocks from the Flatiron Building, the first celluloid print of The Great Train Robbery was readied in the offices of Edison Kinetograph, on Twenty-third Street. Thomas Edison was one of a handful of people in the United States, France, Germany, and Britain who had developed silent movies in the mid-1890s.
Between then and 1903 there had been hundreds of staged fictional films, though none had been as long as The Great Train Robbery, which lasted for all of six minutes. There had been chase movies before, too, many produced in Britain right at the end of the nineteenth century. But they used one camera to tell a simple story simply. The Great Train Robbery, directed and edited by Edwin Porter, was much more sophisticated and ambitious than anything that had gone before. The main reason for this was the way Porter told the story. Since its inception in France in 1895, when the Lumière brothers had given the first public demonstration of moving pictures, film had explored many different locations, to set itself apart from theatre. Cameras had been mounted on trains, outside the windows of ordinary homes, looking in, even underwater. But in The Great Train Robbery, in itself an ordinary robbery followed by a chase, Porter in fact told two stories, which he intercut. That’s what made it so special. The telegraph operator is attacked and tied up, the robbery takes place, and the bandits escape. At intervals, however, the operator is shown struggling free and summoning law enforcement. Later in the film the two narratives come together as the posse chase after the bandits.67 We take such ‘parallel editing’ – intercutting between related narratives – for granted now. At the time, however, people were fascinated as to whether film could throw light on the stream of consciousness, Bergson’s notions of time, or Husserl’s phenomenology. More practical souls were exercised because parallel editing added immeasurably to the psychological tension in the film, and it couldn’t be done in the theatre.68 In late 1903 the film played in every cinema in New York, all ten of them. It was also responsible for Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew leaving their fur business and buying small theatres exclusively dedicated to showing movies. Because they generally charged a nickel for entry, they became known as ‘nickelodeons.’ Both William Fox and Sam Warner were fascinated enough by Porter’s Robbery to buy their own movie theatres, though before long they each moved into production, creating the studios that bore their names.69
Porter’s success was built on by another man who instinctively grasped that the inrimate nature of film, as compared with the theatre, would change the relationship between audience and actor. It was this insight that gave rise to the idea of the movie star. David Wark (D. W.) Griffith was a lean man with grey eyes and a hooked nose. He appeared taller than he was on account of the high-laced hook shoes he wore, which had loops above their heels for pulling them on – his trouser bottoms invariably rode up on the loops. His collar was too big, his string tie too loose, and he liked to wear a large hat when large hats were no longer the fashion. He looked a mess, but according to many, he ‘was touched by genius.’ He was the son of a Confederate Kentucky colonel, ‘Roaring Jake’ Griffith, the only man in the army who, so it was said, could shout to a soldier five miles away.70 Griffith had begun life as an actor but transferred to movies by selling story synopses (these were silent movies, so no scripts were necessary). When he was thirty-two he joined an early film outfit, the Biograph Company in Manhattan, and had been there about a year when Mary Pickford walked in. Born in Toronto in 1893, she was sixteen. Originally christened Gladys Smith, she was a precocious if delicate child. After her father was killed in a paddle-steamer accident, her mother, in reduced circumstances, had been forced to let the master bedroom of their home to a theatrical couple; the husband was a stage manager at a local theatre. This turned into Gladys’s opportunity, for he persuaded Charlotte Smith to let her two daughters appear as extras. Gladys soon found she had talent and liked the life. By the time she was seven, she had moved to New York where, at $15 a week, the pay was better. She was now the major breadwinner of the family.71