EIGHT, THE

group of American painters who exhibited together only once, in New York City in 1908, but established one of the main currents in 20th-century American painting. The original Eight included Robert Henri, leader of the group, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, George Luks, and William J. Glackens. Later the group was joined by George Bellows. Their contribution to American art was not a style held in common but a determination to bring art into closer touch with life. Reacting against an academic and aesthetic tradition that was subservient to European aesthetics, The Eight established their own artistic society in the bustling neighbourhoods of New York City and set out to create a native American painting. Luks, Sloan, Glackens, and Shinn worked as newspaper illustrator-cartoonists; the teeming life they found in New York became the subject of their art, as well as the art of the other four, which presented unidealized views of city lifethe saloons, tenements, pool halls, and slums. Most of The Eight adopted a rough, realistic style, flashy brushwork on a dark ground reminiscent of douard Manet, Gustave Courbet, and the German Dsseldorf school, where Henri had studied. Some of the group took other directions: Prendergast utilized the decorative patterns of colour he found in the work of the French Nabi group in his translations of the American landscape; Arthur Davies painted dreamy twilight scenes evolving from lyrical allegories rather than contemporary life; Lawson's style was lyrically atmospheric. In spite of these deviations from realistic views of city life, their 1908 exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery, a direct reaction against slights by the National Academy of Design, gained all eight the reputation of apostles of ugliness. A few years after their single joint exhibition, the eight painters were absorbed into a larger group called the Ashcan School, which included Bellows, Edward Hopper, Glenn Coleman, Eugene Higgins, and Jerome Myers. The Ashcan School, whose principles and aims were similar to those of The Eight, paved the way for the development of a vital and native trend in American painting of the 20th century.