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“I went to the gutter for my subject…but they were poetic gutters.”
-Jerome Myers No one quite knew what to do with Jerome Myers in 1908. It was a year full of markers of success for the artist—his first solo exhibition at Macbeth Gallery, the Met at his door angling to acquire one of his paintings. But though he was undoubtedly of Ashcan ilk with an artistic beat encompassing the Eastern European and Italian immigrant communities of Manhattan’s rough and tumble Lower East Side, people couldn’t seem to find any agreement on just how Ashcan Jerome Myers really was. The Met declined his painting after some deliberation (too dark, too gritty, too Ashcan), only to pick it up four years later and decide that, wait, never mind, this would actually be a perfect addition to the permanent collection. Robert Henri, meanwhile, leader of the famed and controversial Ashcan clan “The Eight,” refused to include Myers in that group’s inaugural 1908 exhibition (at—you guessed it—Macbeth Gallery). Why Myers was left out remains up for debate (especially since he was friends with several of The Eight’s members), but some speculate it was because Henri found his work too tidy, too sentimental. In other words, not Ashcan enough. So who was right? And why was Myers such an enigma to these groups? Let’s consider Houston Street, an oil painting from around 1908 that makes it clear where each side was coming from, and what they both might’ve been missing. Inside the frame: A solo woman on a sidewalk, ambiguously aged, draped in fabrics, basket in hand. An Eastern European immigrant, we might reasonably wager. To her right, a two-story building with rusty-brown clapboard siding, green shutters, and a light grey awning pulled up to reveal piles of produce. Between the roots and the greens, a man stands in the shadow of the doorframe, looking on; two children gaze from the window, too, and another sneaky one hidden playfully underneath the cabbages. It’s an everyday city scene, just the sort ripe for Ashcan treatment. And yet. The Lower East Side’s Jewish enclave was, in the first decade of the 20th century, the most densely populated place on earth. Photos of Hester and Orchard Streets from that time are claustrophobic just to look at; even when the crowds did disperse, debris from street peddlers and foot traffic littered the unpaved roads. With this in mind, Myers’s painting—a single figure roaming a preternaturally calm and pristine Houston Street, the neighborhood’s northern border—reveals a series of highly controlled edits, intriguing for a man prone to carrying his 9 x 11 inch sketchbook everywhere he walked, at all times of day and night, in order to, in theory, capture the events unfurling in front of him as accurately as possible. But look again at the shopkeeper in the doorway and the children in the window, the air of skepticism and curiosity with which they regard this woman. Houston Street was the dividing line between the Lower East Side and East Village, both in a period of rapid transition but the latter still home to a pocket of the city’s wealthy, the ones who had yet to move northward. For Myers—who grew up in poverty and carried with him a sensitivity to the plights of the lower classes—showing only the chaos and the mud mean firmly entrenching the skewed perspectives of New Yorkers (monied and otherwise) around the immigrant communities on the city’s southeastern edge. Instead, eighty years ahead of Photoshop, he chose to clean up the view. Henri was right to perceive a certain sentimentality in Myers’s work. But there’s reason for it beyond a misplaced rosiness about the state of things. With the commotion removed and a quiet settled over the scene, Houston Street highlights not the Eastern European Jewish immigrant as an idea or cultural flashpoint, but as an actual individual. She is someone carrying touches of the old world quite literally on her back as she navigates her new world identity, juxtaposed with surroundings urban and unfamiliar, both the loneliness and dignity of her story highlighted under Myers’s brush. The story is one that we don’t know, but that we could, maybe, if we just took a walk down a new street, with that 9 x 11 sketchbook, and let the world unfold in all its mud and its grace. Interested in finding out more about this piece? Head here.
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