McSorley`s Pub to The Ashcan art movement, our

McSorley’s Pub to The Ashcan art movement, our American her...
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It can be lots of fun to read stories of America’s heritage, as
American Heritage Magazine would say, to “share in the
stories that have built our nation ... (stories) that make
America the greatest story ever told.” We start here by
looking at McSorley’s, an old ale house on New York
City’s East Side that has been there since 1854, a place
where you can literally encounter world history and
“commune with…the traditions and legends…that have
played a vital role in the development of this nation.” And
if you study this age-old pub closely, you’ll be drawn to
“The Ashcan School” of American art, a small and
rebellious group of artists who were so bold to paint what
interested them in life, ordinary people, commonplace
settings, “men and machines at work, women at leisure,”
both “shocking and educating contemporary tastes.” As
you wind up this heritage trail, you come across an Irish
playwright named Brendan Behan, who oh so frequently
stopped off at McSorley’s as his West Side hit play, The
Hostage, “made the beatnik movement look respectable
uptown.”
September 14, 2003
"Liberty Inn " America’s
most impressive historic
survivors just may be our
taverns—because they’ve
had to do it all on their own,
by offering you exactly the
same kind of comfort they
did your great-grandfather,
by Stephen Beaumont and
Janet Forman, presented by
American Heritage
Magazine, June-July 2003
Artists' by Movement: The
Ashcan School, presented
by Artcyclopedia
Ashcan School, preesnted
by Houghton Mifflin
Ashcan School, presented
by Artlex
Brendan Behan's New York,
by Rosemary Behan, March
17, 2001, presented by the
Telegraph
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McSorley's Bar, 1912, by John Sloan, American, 1871-1951, presented
by Bert Christenson's Cyberspace Gallery
Writing stories for this web site is the most fun when we
just happen on something intriguing and end up following a
trail that exposes us to a variety of things about which we
had no clue. Such is the take of this story.
American Heritage Magazine is a favorite here. Edited by
Richard F. Snow and published by American Heritage Inc.,
an affiliate of the Forbes Magazine Group, American
Heritage “brings our past alive with all the heart and soul,
intrigue and invention, that make America the greatest
story ever told.” The magazine invites us all to “Share in
the stories that have built our nation and have reached
across generations to create the future we all share today.”
And that’s exactly what ended up happening to us here. In
the July 2003 edition, we were attracted to a photo of an
older man happily sitting at a table with a couple of
brewskis, an empty lunch plate and some crackers, hat on,
sweater on, and just smiling for the camera. The caption
read:
“The hard worn, dusty, sagging, and utterly gorgeous
McSorley’s has been serving its ale without
interruption since opening its doors to the Manhattan
of 1854.”
This was from a story entitled, “Liberty Inn,” by Stephen
Beaumont and Janet Forman, who introduced their article
by saying this:
“America’s most impressive historic survivors just
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may be our taverns, because they’ve had to do it all
on their own, by offering you exactly the same kind
of comfort they did your great-grandfather … For
many, perhaps most, Americans, their first visit to a
tavern is a rite of passage, a bridge between youthful
days of sneaking illicit booze in a friend’s basement
and the grownup pleasures of a social drink in good
company. Others, however, find their tentative steps
into the world of the American public house to be an
encounter with world history, a chance to commune
with ghosts: the traditions, legends, and, in some
cases, the very locales that have played a vital role in
the development of this nation.”
McSorley's Old Ale House is one of those places. John
McSorley first opened his pub in 1854, patterning it after
an Irish public house and calling it the Old House at Home.
He changed the name to McSorley’s in 1908 after his old
signboard blew down. At the time of its founding, it was
one of 2400 operating saloons in New York City. John died
in 1910 at the tender age of 87. He had put his son Bill in
charge earlier, in 1890, and Bill guided it in the years it
became famous, finally selling it in 1936. Bill died in 1938.
Both John and Bill personally opened the bar each morning
and closed it every night.
In 1977, Mattie Maher, a native of Kilkenny, Ireland,
bought it from the owner Danny Kirwan. At the time,
Mattie was the manager and chose to do nothing to change
the integrity of America’s oldest continuously operated
public house. That said, it took a Supreme Court case to
allow access to women, a feat accomplished in 1970!
McSorley’s is located at 15 E. Seventh St. in New York.
Tradition has it that McSorley’s golden rule was, “Be good,
or be gone.”
In our research, we learned that McSorley’s became
famous in the 1940s when LIFE Magazine did a pictorial
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on it. But long before this, the tavern had attracted an artist
named John Sloan, who painted McSorley’s more than
once in the early 1900s.
McSorley's, unknown date, by John Sloan, American, 1871 - 1951, gift
of Frank and Jeannette Eyerly, 1984.95.1, presented by The National
Gallery of Art
It turns out that John Sloan is not just any old artist. He is
among a group of six artists belonging to what came to be
known as “The Ashcan School” of artists. This school
consisted of a group of early 20th century American artists
who painted realist pictures of New York City life. One
critic did not like their choice of subjects, which included
alleys, tenements, slum dwellers, and in the case of John
Sloan, taverns frequented by the working class.
Artcyclopedia.com says this about this movement:
“The Ashcan School was a group of artists who
sought to capture the feel of turn-of-the-century New
York City, through realistic and unglamorized
portraits of everyday life.”
This is a most interesting group of artists, in part because
they were rebellious at a time when a little rebellion in the
country was sorely needed. Writing for sohoart.com,
Richard Schiff, in an article entitled “The Ashcan School,
America’s first and only National Movement,” said this:
“The opening years of this century were boom years
for American cities. Filled with office and factory
workers, shopkeepers and immigrants, cities bulged
and spread … The city's vigor and variety attracted a
band of artists who were to revolutionize American
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Art. These men were 'The Eight'- Arthur Davies,
Robert Henri, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson,
George Luks, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan and
Everett Shinn. Their group exhibition in 1908 ... both
shocked and educated contemporary taste. Spurning
the safe road of genteel society portraiture, for which
they were all trained, The Eight painted men and
machines at work, women at leisure. In time their
brand of personalized realism earned them the
nickname, ‘The Ashcan School’. Robert Henri, who
had taught four of the eight, insisted that artists
should ‘make pictures from life’, and the city life
these artists saw was not fixed in one stiff pose. It
was, by turns, both rough and tender, somber and
jubilant. For them the city was, as John Sloan said, ‘a
cosmopolitan palette where the spectrum changed in
every side street.’ ‘Forget about art!’ Robert Henri
told his classes, ‘and paint pictures of what interests
you in life.’ His best students did not forget about art,
but they did portray life with a new boldness and
vision. For their subject matter they took to the
streets. John Sloan preferred the seamy side of town
over the elegant fifth avenue style. He enjoyed the
‘drab, shabby, happy, sad and human’ life he found
there.”
One of the places he enjoyed painting was McSorley’s.
Interestingly, the group's preference for ordinary people
and commonplace settings came partly from their training
as newspaper artists, a job that took them to murders, fires
and parades. They tended to focus on the immediate scene,
and the moods of the people in those scenes.
Thanks to Artcyclopedia.com, we have managed to collect
images of important paintings by the six who formed the
core of “The Ashcan School” of art:
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Snow in New York, 1902, by Robert Henri, 1865-1929,
from the Chester Dale Collection, 1954.4.3
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In the Steerage, 1900, by George Benjamin Luks,
1866-1933, from the Elizabeth Gibson Taylor and Walter
Frank Taylor Fund and the North Carolina Art Society
(Robert F. Phifer Bequest), 98.12
The Shoppers, 1907, by William Glackens, 1870-1938, a
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gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
The City from Greenwich Village, 1922, by John Sloan,
1871-1951, a gift of Helen Farr Sloan,1970.1.1
Eviction, 1904 , by Everett Shinn, 1876-1953, the
Smithsonian American Art Museum at the bequest of
Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of
Design
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New York, 1911, by George Bellows, 1882-1925, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., from the collection of
Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon
We’d like to conclude by
introducing you to a fellow
named Brendan Behan.
Behan was an Irish
playwright, New York was
his favorite city, and he
was known throughout the
town as one who loved to
frequent the corner tavern.
In an article carried by
Britain’s Telegraph in
March 2001, done by
Rosemary Behan, his niece, we again learn of McSorley’s.
Brendan Behan arrived in New York in 1960, already a
well-known Irish playwright, described by Rosemary as “a
bawdy, iconoclastic, ex-Irish revolutionary, ballad-singing,
jig-dancing, stocky, rumpled, wild-haired, thirty-sevenyear-old Dublin playwright named Brendan Behan.”
When he arrived in New York, his play, “The Hostage,”
had been running in the West End for over a year and
Borstal Boy, his autobiography, had just been published.
Known throughout the world for his love of drink, he had
been on the wagon for five months, and drank milk before
the journalists who were chasing after him.
He did not stay on the wagon for long thereafter, however.
Some two months after his arrival in the US, the
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temptations of New York’s bars were simply too much.
Rosemary Behan tells it this way:
“Only two months after his arrival in the city,
Brendan was back on the bottle, gatecrashing his
own play after seven bottles of Champagne, singing
to the audience and lecturing the actors … In those
days he wasn't hard to find. His haunts included the
White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas
supposedly had his last drink; Chumley's, the snug
revolutionary speakeasy where he met Hemingway;
and P J Clarke's on Third Avenue … The Algonquin
Hotel, too, has had a facelift since the 1960s, when
Brendan sat at its famed Round Table with Thornton
Wilder, James Thurber and Norman Mailer … Judge
James J Comerford banned him from the 1963 St
Patrick's Day parade for being a ‘drunken disgrace’.
Brendan told the American press that he had a new
theory about what happened to the snakes when St
Patrick drove them out of Ireland: ‘They all swam to
America and became New York judges.’ He was then
invited to the New Jersey parade and received the
key to the city … Though he loved the energy of
1960s New York, he understood the fears of Irish
immigrants who had arrived earlier, who had
adjusted to the New World only to see it swept away
by an even newer one, their tenements flattened to
make way for skyscrapers. He would talk over these
developments with them in McSorley's Old Ale
House in what is now the East Village. The bar, he
noted, ‘has been there for about a hundred years and
is worth a visit from anybody of any sort, size, shape
or creed … The conversation in the saloon is great
on New York, which of course these old men do not
appreciate now, for they remember the time when the
buildings were half the size. They certainly do not
appreciate the Time-Life building, nor for the matter
of that, the Empire State Building.’”
So, there you have a little American history of a different
kind. Throughout all of this, you find a strong and common
thread of the essence of America, a little bit of rebellion
and a little bit of rabble-rousing. In their article for
American Heritage Magazine, Beaumont and Forman
remind us of this:
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Lessia Bigler, proprietor (along with her husband, Chuck), sits at the bar
in the warm, subdued glow of her factory for the production of human
contentment, Puempel’s Olde Tavern, in New Glarus, Wisconsin. The
apparent scattering of dead leaves on the ceiling is in fact dollar bills.
Presented by American Heritage Magazine.
“Our nation was born in taverns. In colonial America
they were places where people would go not only to
eat and drink and pass the time but to argue the
issues of the day, more and more vehemently as the
gulf with Great Britain widened … On the one hand,
our traditional Puritan ethic requires us to eschew
wasting time in barrooms; on the other hand,
tavern-going is in our genes, and a large part of
tavern culture was handed down from our
God-fearing but beer-loving forebears … It’s no
surprise that few American taverns have lasted as
long as McSorley’s. The owners of every surviving
hundred-year-old bar once needed the business
acumen of a Rockefeller and the daring of a
Leonardo to stay in business. During Prohibition
they transformed their establishments into everything
from grocery stores to bordellos.”
As for The Ashcan School, the heart of its movement in art
was to tell it like it is. They opposed the academics of the
day, they were conservatives whose artistry content was
revolutionary, and they focused on urban scenes that at
once exposed the darker sides of city life but at the same
time portrayed the vitality of urban living. They became
known as the “revolutionary black gang” and “apostles of
ugliness,” eventually getting tagged as the Ashcan School.
For his part, Brendan Behan’s hit play, “The Hostage,” was
about a "British soldier held captive in a Dublin
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flophouse.” Behan himself was raised, according to
Rosemary Behan, his niece, “in a poor and staunchly
Republican household. ‘Burn all things British, except their
coal,’ my grandmother urged their children. Hardly
surprising, then, that (Brendan) ended up in a borstal at 16
for being caught in Liverpool with bomb-making
equipment … I reflected on Norman Mailer’s view of the
opening of The Hostage: ‘New York was dead in those
days. Brendan Behan’s Hostage broke the ice … It made
the beatnik movement, Kerouac, Ginsberg, myself and
others, respectable uptown.’”
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