Anxiety and Occlusion: New York in the Imagination of American Impressionist and Ashcan School Artists, 1885-1914

Art historians have taken paintings of New York City by William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and Childe Hassam to be forthright documents of a time when the city was becoming a world metropolis. Examining Chase's paintings of New York City's partially industrialized suburban fringe, Hassam's figure of the nocturnal solitary woman walking alone on Manhattan streets, as well as Hassam's and Sloan's crowd imagery, this dissertation shows that these artists offer a more circumspect vision than has been heretofore acknowledged. Moreover, the project links two groups, the American Impressionists and the Ashcan School Artists, who are rarely seen in existing accounts as having shared subjects much less a shared attitude to New York's rapid modernization during these years. In order to support this reinterpretation, the contemporary salience of subjects, such as Coney Island, luxury apartment buildings, solitary women, and overburdened commuter ferryboats, is reconstructed using newspaper accounts, graphic art, period photographs, court documents, novels, and governmental reports. However, this is not simply an exercise in iconographic identification. Modernist representational strategies that lessen verisimilitude, emphasize surface, and upset the continuity of the painting's fictive space are deployed to render these subjects in paint, and this project explicates the combination of formal ambiguity with an analogously contradictory tone of aversion mixed with fascination.