The Eight (Ash Can School), artists who joined ranks in 1908 to challenge the conservative dominance of the National Academy, does not count Jerome Myers among its number. Yet the pioneering work done by Myers places him in the forefront of contemporary realist artists. His focused concentration depicting the environment and inhabitants of New York City’s Lower East Side immigrant neighborhood catapults Jerome Myers into the forefront of artists who boldly sought out expressions of contemporary life. Myers’s work allows us to understand these immigrant neighborhoods in a way that would not be possible today if his art did not exist. This book examines Myers’s biography and art in detail, establishing not only his preeminant claim to a position at the forefront of the Eight, but also his role as artist-historian of a bygone neighborhood and the positive life of immigrants who lived there.
