In the bustling thoroughfares of early 20th-century New York, something revolutionary was happening. Artists were abandoning their ivory towers and fancy subjects to capture the gritty, unvarnished truth of everyday American life. American realism was a movement in art, music and literature that depicted contemporary social realities and the lives and everyday activities of ordinary people. The movement began in literature in the mid-19th century, and became an important tendency in visual art in the early 20th century.

This wasn’t just a change in artistic technique—it was a complete reimagining of what art could be and do. Whether depicting the cultural melting pot of Lower East Side tenements or the scenic views of downtown Manhattan, American realist works attempted to define what was real.

The Birth of a Movement

At the dawn of the 20th century, America was transforming at breakneck speed. From the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, the United States experienced huge industrial, economic, social and cultural change. A continuous wave of European immigration and the rising potential for international trade brought increasing growth and prosperity to America. This rapid transformation created a perfect storm for artistic innovation.

A new generation of painters, writers, and journalists was coming of age, and they weren’t content to simply follow in the footsteps of their predecessors. While they acknowledged the influence of established American artists like Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Winslow Homer, they were interested in creating new and more urbane works that reflected city life and a population that was more urban than rural in the U.S. as it entered the new century.

The Ashcan School: Art’s Revolutionary Gang

Perhaps no group embodied the spirit of American Realism more than the Ashcan School, also known as The Eight. These artists were on a mission to capture the authentic feel of early 20th-century New York City through realistic portraits of everyday life. But their choice of subjects was radical for its time.

These artists preferred to depict the richly and culturally textured lower class immigrants, rather than the rich and promising Fifth Avenue socialites. Their canvases featured alleys, tenements, slum dwellers, and working-class taverns—subject matter that earned them the nickname “the revolutionary black gang and apostles of ugliness” from one particularly disapproving critic.

The Masters of Urban Reality

Robert Henri (1865–1921) emerged as the philosophical leader of this movement. Henri was interested in the spectacle of common life. He focused on individuals, strangers, quickly passing in the streets in towns and cities. His was a sympathetic rather than a comic portrayal of people, often using a dark background to add to the warmth of the person depicted. His teaching philosophy was equally revolutionary: he encouraged students to use their art to “make a stir in the world” and advised them that “It isn’t the subject that counts but what you feel about it.”

George Bellows (1882–1925) brought an expressionist boldness to his depictions of city life. His paintings had an expressionist boldness and a willingness to take risks. He had a fascination with violence as seen in his 1909 painting Both Members of This Club, which depicts a gory boxing scene. His work captured the raw energy and sometimes brutal reality of urban American life.

George B. Luks (1866–1933) chose to focus on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but with a twist. Rather than dwelling on the hardships of poverty, he looks for the joy and beauty in the life of the poor rather than the tragedy. His painting “The Spielers” showed two young girls dancing in the street, finding celebration even in the midst of difficult circumstances.

John Sloan (1871–1951) brought a socialist perspective to his work, joining the Socialist Party in 1910. From 1912 to 1916, he contributed illustrations to the socialist monthly The Masses. Sloan disliked propaganda, and in his drawings for The Masses, as in his paintings, he focused on the everyday lives of people. Interestingly, he later expressed frustration with being categorised as a painter of “the American Scene,” calling it “a symptom of nationalism, which has caused a great deal of trouble in this world.”

Edward Hopper: The Modern Master

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. Hopper is the most modern of the American realists and the most contemporary. His work represented an evolution in American Realism, moving beyond the bustling street scenes of the Ashcan School to explore themes of isolation and alienation in modern American life. His spare and calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of both urban and rural American experiences.

Beyond the Canvas: Literature’s Realistic Revolution

American Realism wasn’t confined to painting. The movement found equally powerful expression in literature, where writers began to document American life with unprecedented honesty and detail.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835–1910) revolutionised American literature by capturing authentic American speech patterns and attitudes. Twain’s style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm. His influence was so profound that Ernest Hemingway later declared that all American fiction springs from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) brought journalistic precision to fiction writing. Primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays, Crane saw life at its rawest in slums and on battlefields. His novel “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” (1893) is considered one of the earliest naturalistic American novels, telling the harrowing story of a poor girl failed by her family and society with unflinching objectivity.

Music of the People

The realist movement extended into music as well, where composers began incorporating authentic American folk traditions into their work. W.C. Handy (1873–1958), known as the “Father of the Blues,” exemplified this approach. While Handy was not the first to publish music in the blues form, he took the blues from a not very well known regional music style to one of the dominant forces in American music. Handy was an educated musician who used folk material in his compositions.

Similarly, Scott Joplin (c. 1867/68–1917) elevated ragtime from popular entertainment to artistic respectability, with compositions like “The Entertainer” capturing the rhythms and energy of American urban life.

The Documentary Spirit

American Realism also embraced photography and journalism as tools for social change. Jacob August Riis (1849–1914), a Danish-American journalist and photographer, used his camera to document the harsh conditions in New York’s tenements. He is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the less fortunate in New York City, which was the subject of most of his prolific writings and photographic essays. As one of the early pioneers of flash photography, Riis created a visual record that complemented the written and painted documentation of American life.

Legacy and Impact

American Realism fundamentally changed how Americans saw themselves and their country. Through art and artistic expression (through all mediums including painting, literature and music), American Realism attempted to portray the exhaustion and cultural exuberance of the figurative American landscape and the life of ordinary Americans at home.

The movement’s emphasis on authentic American experiences, rather than imitations of European models, helped establish a distinctly American cultural identity. By turning their attention to the streets, tenements, and everyday struggles of ordinary people, these artists created a visual and literary record of American life during a period of unprecedented change.

The Ashcan School and the broader American Realism movement laid the groundwork for American Modernism in the visual arts, proving that American artists could find profound subject matter in their own backyards. Their influence extended far beyond their own era, inspiring generations of artists to look closely at their own communities and times, finding in the mundane and everyday the raw material for great art.

In choosing to depict what was real rather than what was idealised, American Realism didn’t just change art—it changed how America saw itself. The movement proved that ordinary life, with all its struggles and small triumphs, was worthy of the highest artistic treatment. In doing so, it democratised both art and its subjects, creating a more inclusive vision of what American culture could be.

By Mohan Dharmaratne