The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (26 page)

 
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Art Students League of New York
.

An art school established in 1875 when that of the
National Academy of Design
temporarily closed. Unlike the Academy School (which reopened in 1877), the Art Students League had no entrance requirements and no set course. Its more progressive methods soon attracted many students—at the turn of the century the enrolment stood at nearly a thousand. By this time it was the most important art school in the country. The teachers there have included
Benton
,
Chase
,
Eakins
,
Henri
,
Saint-Gaudens
, and
Sloan
; and the students have included many of the most illustrious names in 20th-cent. American art.

 
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(1586–1646).
English collector and patron of the arts. Apart from Charles I, he was the greatest English collecter of his time. His knowledge of art was based partly on extensive travels in Europe, his most important journey being made with Inigo
Jones
in 1613–14, when they carried out archaeological investigations in Rome. His agents sought out antiquities that he imported from all over Europe and even the Levant. He also patronized living artists, notably
Rubens
and van
Dyck
(both of whom painted him), and he brought
Hollar
to England. Of the Old Masters, he collected especially works by
Holbein
and
Dürer
. His great collections were gradually dispersed after his death, but much of his collection of classical scuplture is in the
Ashmolean Museum
, Oxford.

 
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Asam , Cosmas Damian
(1686–1739) and
Egid Quirin

(1692–1750).
Bavarian architects and decorators, brothers. They studied in Rome (1711–14) and developed further the dramatic effects of light and illusionism with which Italian
Baroque
artists, notably
Bernini
and
Pozzo
, had experimented. Both men worked as architects, but Cosmas Damian was also a prolific fresco painter, and Egid Quirin was a sculptor and
stuccoist
. They worked best as a team, and their ecclesiastical buildings were the supreme expression of the Bavarian delight in decorative display; architecture, painting, and sculpture unite to set a scene in which light and colour are the chief actors. The best known of their churches is that of St John Nepomuk , Munich (1733–46). The brothers themselves paid for the building (which was attached to Egid Quirin's house), and it is often referred to simply as the ‘Asamkirche’.

 
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Ash-can School
.

A term (first used in print in 1934) loosely applied to a group of American painters active in New York from about 1908 until the First World War, in reference to the everyday urban subject matter they favoured. The painters embraced by the term were inspired largely by Robert
Henri
, and the four central figures had been members of the group The
Eight
, which he had founded. They were
Glackens
,
Luks
,
Shinn
, and
Sloan
. All four had been artist-reporters on the
Philadelphia Press
and so had been used to making rapid sketches of scenes of everyday life. In style and technique the artists of the Ash-can School are now seen to have differed less from contemporary academic painting than they themselves believed. Although they often painted slum life and outcasts, they were interested more in the picturesque aspects of these subjects than in the social issues they raised.
Bellows
and
Hopper
are among the other artists associated with the group.

 
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