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2. Among the most influential are Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle (1967; rept. Detroit: Black and Red, 1970)Google Scholar; and Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations (New York: Semiotext [e], 1983).Google Scholar

3. A number of cultural historians have chronicled this economic transformation. Trachtenberg, Alan, for example, in The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982)Google Scholar, argues that industrial capitalism altered every facet of American life from “the shape and texture of everyday life” to the way Americans thought of themselves. In The Culture of Consumption (New York: Pantheon, 1983), Fox, Wrightman et al. Google Scholar explore the idea of consumption as a hegemonic cultural ideal.

4. See chapter 1 of Debord, , Society of the Spectacle.Google Scholar

5. Trachtenberg, , Incorporation of America, p. 132Google Scholar. See also Harris, Neil, “The Drama of Consumer Desire,” in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar, for a useful exploration of consumer consciousness.

6. Sennett, Richard (The Fall of Public Man ], p. 137)Google Scholar, writing about Paris in the mid-19th Century, argues that only the bourgeoisie had the means, both physical and monetary, to travel to various sectors of the city to shop. In New York, although early large stores werebuilt on the Lower East Side, most quickly moved up to midtown so middleclass shoppers could avoid traveling to an area deemed by some to be less than desirable.

7. Bowlby, Rachel, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 4.Google Scholar

8. Bronner, Simon, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920 (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 16.Google Scholar

9. See, for example, Benson, Susan Porter, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 17–20, 38–47.Google Scholar

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13. For an interesting discussion of the evolution of window display, see Leach, William, “Strategists of Display and the Production of Desire,”Google Scholar in Bronner, , Consuming Visions, pp. 99–132.Google Scholar

14. Leach, , “Strategists of Display,” p. 110.Google Scholar

15. Leach, , “Strategists of Display,” p. 106.Google Scholar

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19. Schlereth, , Victorian America, p. 223.Google Scholar

20. Wilmerding, John, “Bellows' Boxing Pictures and the American Tradition,”in Bellows: The Boxing Pictures, ed. Carmean, E. A. et al. , Exhibition Catalogue (Washington, D.C.: Naxstional Gallery, 1982), p. 21.Google Scholar

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22. Although Eakins does depict a cheering crowd in Salutat (1898)Google Scholar, for example, the painting seems to be more interested in the physiognomy of the victorious boxer.

23. Wilmerding, , “Bellows' Boxing Pictures,” p. 21Google Scholar. See, for example, William Glackens's boxing illustration for “A Sucker” (Scribner's, 05 1905)Google Scholar in which there is a fight in the crowd. In the foreground and middleground of Glackens, 's Roller Skating Rink (1906)Google Scholar is a group of people watching the skaters.

24. Haywood, , “George Bellows's Stag at Sharkey's,” p. 12.Google Scholar

25. See also the drawings Introducing Georges Carpentier and Introducing the Champion.

26. Braider, Donald, George Bellows and the Ashcan School of Painting (New York: Doubleday, 1971), p. 96.Google Scholar

27. See Doezema, Marianne's “The Real New York” (The Paintings of George Bellows [New York: Harry Abrams, 1992], pp. 97–133)Google Scholar for an extended discussion of the historical and artistic background of The Sawdust Trail.

28. Carmean, E. A., “Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” in Bellows: The Boxing Pictures, p. 38.Google Scholar

29. May, Lary, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 28.Google Scholar

30. For more on the transformation both of vaudeville's content and the gender of its audience, see Barth, City People, and Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

31. “The Vaudeville House,” Scribner's (09 1899): 486.Google Scholar

32. The Orchestra Pit, Old Proctor's Fifth Avenue Theatre (ca. 1906–1907)Google Scholar seems to be a visually arresting exception; the viewer is practically in the orchestra pit watching the cancan dancers on the stage above. E. F. Proctor owned several vaudeville theaters in New York and early on saw the economic potential of attracting women to the theater.

33. May, , Screening Out the Past, p. 36.Google Scholar

34. Sloan, John, The Gist of Art, (New York: American Artists Group, 1939), p. 230.Google Scholar

35. Schlereth, , Victorian America, p. 205.Google Scholar

36. Elzea, Rowland and Hawkes, Elizabeth, John Sloan: Spectator of Life, Exhibition Catalogue (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1988), p. 59Google Scholar. Although Sloan later commented that this etching was of a nickelodeon (Elzea, and Hawkes, , John Sloan Figure 5)Google Scholar, it is actually a representation of a kinetoscope, a forerunner of the nickelodeon.

37. May, , Screening Out the Past, p. 36.Google Scholar

38. Sloan, , Gist of Art, p. 211.Google Scholar

39. Kasson, John, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 53.Google Scholar

40. Kasson, , Amusing the Million, p. 66.Google Scholar

41. Kasson, , Amusing the Million, p. 71.Google Scholar

42. John, Bruce St., ed., John Sloan's New York Scene: From the Diaries, Notes, and Correspondence, 1906–1913 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 141.Google Scholar

43. Patricia Burnham argues that the beach, Coney Island at first, and then Gloucester, Massachusetts, is an especially significant subject in Theresa Bernstein's oeuvre; it is the “subject that seemed to liberate [her] brush” from the dark color scheme of the Ashcan school (“Theresa Bernstein,” Woman's Art Journal [Fall 1988/Winter 1989]: 22).Google Scholar

44. StJohn, , John Sloan's New York Scene, p. 140.Google Scholar

45. Claudia Brush Kid well and Valerie Steele, Men and Women: Dressing the Part (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1989), p. 119.Google Scholar

46. Elzea, and Hawkes, , John Sloan, p. 75Google Scholar. Note that Sloan comments only on the woman's suit even though the men's “tank suits” were a new phenomenon on the beach. See Kidwell, and Steele, 's Men and Women (pp. 117–19)Google Scholar for a history of bathing suits, both men's and women's.

47. See, in addition to works discussed here, Ricciotti, Dominic, The Urban Scene: Images of the City in American Painting, 1890–1930 (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1977)Google Scholar; Brown, Milton, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955)Google Scholar; and Perlman, Bennard, Painters of the Ashcan School: The Immortal Eight (New York: Dover, 1979)Google Scholar. The two most prominent exceptions, to which I will return, focus on women in Sloan's work: Hills, Patricia, “John Sloan's Images of Working Class Women,” Prospects 5 (1980): 157–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kinser, Suzanne L., “Prostitutes in the Art of John Sloan,” Prospects 9 (1984): 231–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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49. Rose, , American Art Since 1900, pp. 26, 33.Google Scholar

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51. Goodrich, Lloyd, John Sloan (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 22.Google Scholar

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55. Zurier, , “Picturing the City,” pp. 374–75Google Scholar. She also convincingly argues that Sloan's depictions of urban pastimes do not turn audiences into “passive alienated consumers” as Debord and theorist Jean Baudrillard would argue. Rather, they can be seen as “constructive moments of communication.”

56. Sloan, Helen Farr, ed., John Sloan: New York Etchings, 1905–1949 (New York: Dover, 1978), Figure 3.Google Scholar

57. Kidwell, and Steele, , Men and Women, p. 51.Google Scholar

58. Sloan, no doubt, liked to poke fun at the conspicuous display of the wealthy, as he often did in the Masses, but he mostly did it through the figure of women. See both Fifth Avenue Critics (1905)Google Scholar and Fifth Avenue (1909).Google Scholar

59. Sloan, Helen Farr, John Sloan, Figure 58.Google Scholar

60. Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789 to 1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 92.Google Scholar

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66. Brooks, Van Wyck, John Sloan: A Painter's Life (New York: Dutton, 1955), p. 65.Google Scholar

67. This spot at Fifth Avenue and Broadway at 23d Street has become legendary. Marie Jastrow re members that the “ankle watchers” at the intersection were “shooed away by the police” – hence the expression “23 skidoo,” in Jastrow, Marie, Looking Back: The American Dream Through Immigrant Eyes (New York: Norton, 1986)Google Scholar. Sloan's only work including the Building, Flatiron, Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue (1906)Google Scholar, seems not to reflect what Brooks identifies as the work is mostly of children being blown to and fro by the heavy winds, and no skirts are flying.

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