American realism was an art, music, and literature movement that showed everyday life and social situations of ordinary people. It started in literature around the middle of the 19th century and became a major style in visual art during the early 20th century. Whether showing people’s lives or scenes like downtown New York City, American realist works aimed to show what was truly real.

At the start of the 20th century in the United States, a new group of painters, writers, and journalists was growing up. Many of these painters were influenced by older American artists such as Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Thomas Pollock Anshutz, and William Merritt Chase. However, they wanted to create new works that reflected city life and a population that was becoming more urban than rural as the United States entered the new century.

America in the early 20th century

From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, the United States went through major changes in industry, economy, society, and culture. A steady flow of immigrants from Europe and the growing possibility of trade with other countries helped the United States grow and become more prosperous. Through art, including painting, writing, and music, American Realism aimed to show the hard work and lively culture of everyday life in America. Artists used the sights, sounds, and feelings of cities to shape the colors, textures, and styles of their work. Musicians noticed the fast pace of life in the early 1900s and created music with new, lively rhythms. Writers told stories about real American children and families, focusing on their lives instead of fantasy. Moving away from imaginary ideas and focusing on the present, American Realism opened a new way to understand the world and introduced modernism, which is about living in the current moment. Groups such as The Ashcan School, also called The Eight, and Ten American Painters were central to creating the new style of modern art in the United States.

Ashcan school and the Eight

The Ashcan school was a group of artists in New York City who wanted to show real life in the city during the early 1900s through their paintings. These artists focused on the everyday lives of working-class immigrants, not the wealthy people who lived on Fifth Avenue. One critic at the time did not like their choice of subjects, which included places like alleys, tenements, and taverns where working-class people gathered. These artists were sometimes called the "revolutionary black gang" and "apostles of ugliness" by others.

George Bellows (1882–1925) painted scenes from New York City. His paintings had a bold and strong style, and he was willing to take creative risks. He was interested in showing scenes of violence, like in his 1909 painting Both Members of This Club, which shows a bloody boxing match. His 1913 painting Cliff Dwellers shows a cityscape made by combining many different views.

Robert Henri (1865–1921) was an important American Realist and a member of the Ashcan school. He was interested in showing the lives of ordinary people. He painted people he saw quickly passing by in streets and cities. His paintings often used dark backgrounds to highlight the warmth of the people he depicted. His work was known for strong brushstrokes and thick layers of paint. Henri influenced other artists, including Glackens, Luks, Shinn, and Sloan. In 1906, he was elected to the National Academy of Design, but later he left the group after others were rejected for an exhibition. He called the academy "a cemetery of art."

Everett Shinn (1876–1953), a member of the Ashcan school, painted scenes of New York City and the theater. He also painted scenes of luxury and modern life inspired by his home in the city. He painted theater scenes in London, Paris, and New York. He compared crowded theaters to the busy lives of city people, showing how people in the audience interacted with performers.

George B. Luks (1866–1933) was an Ashcan school artist who lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In his painting Hester Street (1905), he showed children being entertained by a man with a toy while a woman and shopkeeper talked in the background. The viewer feels part of the crowd, not above it. Luks showed the joy in the lives of poor people, like in The Spielers, where two young girls dance on the street despite their difficult lives.

William Glackens (1870–1938) painted scenes around his studio in Washington Square Park early in his career. He was also a successful illustrator, creating drawings and watercolors for magazines that showed humorous scenes of New Yorkers in their daily lives. Later, he became known as "the American Renoir" for his Impressionist paintings of the seashore and French Riviera.

John Sloan (1871–1951) was a Realist artist in the Ashcan school who joined the Socialist Party in 1910 because he cared about social issues. He moved to New York in 1904 and worked on illustrations for a socialist magazine called The Masses from 1912 to 1916. He avoided propaganda and focused on showing everyday life. His paintings often showed the leisure of the working class, especially women. He disliked being called part of the Ashcan school and said he preferred to paint "little sensitive comments" about life rather than be labeled as part of the "American Scene."

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was a well-known American realist painter and printmaker. He was the most modern of the American realists. He was skilled in painting, watercolor, and printmaking. His work showed his vision of modern American life in both city and rural scenes.

Hopper’s teacher, Robert Henri, encouraged students to use art to "make a stir in the world." He also told students, "It isn’t the subject that counts but what you feel about it" and "Forget about art and paint pictures of what interests you in life." Henri influenced Hopper, as well as other artists like George Bellows and Rockwell Kent. Some artists in Henri’s circle, including John Sloan, became members of a group called "The Eight," also known as the Ashcan school. Hopper’s first oil painting that hinted at his famous interiors was Solitary Figure in a Theater (c. 1904). During his student years, he painted many nudes, still lifes, landscapes, and portraits, including his own self-portraits.

Other artists associated with the Ashcan school or related movements include Joseph Stella, Charles Sheeler, Jonas Lie, Edward Willis Redfield, Joseph Pennell, Leon Kroll, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, Gertrude Käsebier, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, E. J. Bellocq, Philip Koch, David Hanna, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry.

Writers

Horatio Alger Jr. (1832–1899) was a 19th-century American writer who wrote many books about young people who rose from poverty to middle-class success. His stories often followed characters like bootblacks, newsboys, and peddlers as they faced challenges and eventually achieved stability. One of his most famous books is Ragged Dick, which was very popular during his time.

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was born in Newark, New Jersey. His family had a long history of people who lived in the American Revolution, including soldiers, clergymen, and farmers. Crane worked as a journalist and also wrote fiction, essays, and plays. He experienced difficult lives in poor neighborhoods and on battlefields. His novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) was widely praised, but he died at 28 due to poor health. His book Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is considered one of the first naturalistic American novels. It tells the sad story of a young girl who struggles with poverty, an alcoholic parent, and a harsh life. She becomes a prostitute to survive and eventually dies. Crane’s writing style focused on real-life events without moralizing.

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) wrote fiction and essays in the realist style. He believed in showing life as it truly was, and his ideas about realism connected with his views on socialism. As an editor for The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine, and as the author of books like A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells influenced many writers and helped shape literary theories.

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. He helped American writers move away from overly romantic or flowery writing styles by using everyday speech. His book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn became a foundation for American fiction. Twain’s writing style used realistic, conversational language that reflected the humor and uniqueness of American culture. His works, such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, are among his most famous.

Sam. R. Watkins (1839–1901) was a writer and storyteller who wrote about his experiences as a soldier in the Confederate Army in his memoir Co. Aytch. He described war in a realistic way, showing the hardships, boredom, and suffering of soldiers rather than focusing on heroism or glory. He wrote about long marches, harsh discipline, poor leadership, and the brutal reality of battle. His book offered a clear, unromantic view of war.

Other writers from this time included Edward Eggleston, Theodore Dreiser, Margaret Deland, Henry James, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Edith Wharton, Ambrose Bierce, and J. D. Salinger.

Journalism

Jacob August Riis (1849–1914) was a Danish-American journalist, photographer, and social reformer. He was born in Ribe, Denmark. He used his skills in photography and journalism to help poor people in New York City. His work focused on the lives of these people, which he wrote about in many articles and photo essays. He worked with Lawrence Veiller, a humanitarian, to improve housing in New York. He was one of the first photographers to use flash, which made him an important figure in the history of photography.

Art Young (1866–1943) was an American cartoonist and writer. He is best known for his political cartoons, especially those published in The Masses, a magazine with strong political views. Young was a co-editor of the magazine from 1911 to 1917. He was not politically active at first but later became interested in ideas that supported social change. By 1906, he considered himself a socialist. By 1910, his work often showed problems like unfair treatment based on race or gender and unfair parts of the economic system.

Music

James A. Bland (1854–1919) was the first well-known African-American songwriter. He is famous for his song "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny." Other songs he wrote include "In the Evening by the Moonlight," "Golden Slippers," "In the Morning by the Bright Light," and "De Golden Wedding." Most of his songs were written between 1879 and 1882. In 1881, he traveled to England with Haverly's Genuine Colored Minstrels. He stayed in England until 1890 because he found it more rewarding than the United States. During this time, he may have stopped writing songs or had trouble finding a publisher in England.

C.A. White (1829–1892) wrote the popular song "Put Me in My Little Bed" in 1869, which made him a well-known songwriter. He aimed to create serious music and wrote many songs for groups of singers. He also tried to write operas. As a co-owner of the music publishing company White, Smith & Company, he had a good way to share his work. His songs helped support the company, not the other way around. He also wrote songs for the stage, including one for the African-American play Out of Bondage, but most of his work was meant for people who sang in homes.

W. C. Handy (1873–1958) was a blues composer and musician, often called the "Father of the Blues." He is one of the most important American songwriters. Though many musicians played blues music, Handy is credited with shaping it into its modern form. He was not the first to publish blues music, but he helped make it widely known. He was an educated musician who used traditional music in his songs. He carefully noted the sources of his work, which often combined styles from different performers. He deeply loved the blues and made it more special through his compositions.

Scott Joplin (c. 1867/68–1917) was an African-American musician and composer of ragtime music. He is the most famous figure in this style. His music became popular again in the 1970s, especially his famous piece "The Entertainer."

Legacy and influence

In later years, museums and critics have often considered "American realism" as a repeated way of showing American subjects, using the term for exhibitions that include works beyond the early-20th-century Ashcan School. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's traveling exhibition "Modern American Realism: Highlights from the Sara Roby Foundation Collection" showed mid-century figurative art and included artists such as Will Barnet, Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, and George Tooker.

Other realist styles were described with more specific names. The Museum of Modern Art explains that Social Realism was a movement popular during the time between the two World Wars, created in response to social, political, and economic challenges.

In documentary photography, the Library of Congress says the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information black-and-white negatives were taken by Roy Stryker’s federal photographic unit (1935–1944) and includes the work of photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks.

Museums and exhibitions have also shown how realist imagery appears in film and staged photography. Alongside the exhibition "Hopper Drawing," the Whitney Museum of American Art noted a "lasting connection" between Hopper’s paintings and movies. The Metropolitan Museum of Art described Cornelia Parker’s roof installation "Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)" as inspired by Hopper’s paintings and by symbols of American architecture, including the Bates mansion from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho. The Williams College Museum of Art exhibition "Drawing on Hopper: Gregory Crewdson/Edward Hopper" paired Hopper’s preparatory sketches with photographs by Gregory Crewdson.

Postwar exhibitions have continued to use "American realism" as a category for figurative painting and photography after 1945. The Drents Museum and Kunsthalle Emden exhibition "The American Dream – American Realism 1945–2017" included artists such as Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, Alice Neel, Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz, and Chuck Close. The term has also been used to describe later figurative artists: the Orlando Museum of Art said Bo Bartlett’s paintings are "within the tradition of American realism," and a 2015 review in Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that Max Zorn’s illuminated tape works drew on "the art of American realism." Museums have also described Photorealism as a unique style in the United States that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles exhibition "Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968" included artists such as Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, and Duane Hanson.