As part of my MA earlier this year I wrote an essay which compared 1900-30s modernist fiction with visual art from the same period. Although I focussed on only a couple of artists–the piece ended up being titled ‘Cézanne & Hemingway; Picasso & Dos Passos: Modernism’s Refiguring of Perspective in Literature and the Visual Arts’–the research gave me a taste for modernist painting and collage. As a framing device for the essay I wrote about the Armory Show, which took place in New York in 1913 and saw American and European work sat side by side. The show served to highlight a dramatic difference between the two contemporary schools: the Europeans largely experimenting with different ways of depicting forms, and the Americans committed to developing an urban realism which explicated their thriving cities.

At the National Gallery until 30 May is a set of paintings which come from this ‘Ashcan school’: work by William Glackens, George Luks, John Sloan and George Bellows. I visited the exhibition this week and was particularly taken by the half-dozen Bellows paintings. ‘North River’ (1908) in particular impressed with its dynamic sense of space. The viewer looks down a steep hill, across a span of water and up the cliffs on the other side. The angles are perhaps a little unnaturally exaggerated but it makes the scene feel alive. As do the human touches: benches at angles in the snow, a couple of people in conversation at the shore, steam ships moving across the bay.

Bellows does snow like no one else. His brush strokes capture its sweep, its lightness and its density as it sits untouched, or swept aside, piled beneath trees. But it’s the colour that really gets it. Bellows knows that the shadows of snow, and the real meat of it, are not white but blue. Several different shades of blue expertly combined; ‘Blue Snow, The Battery’ (1910) is the best example on display at the National. There’s a sedate peace about the snow which informs the whole image. It’s hung next to a 1908 image called ‘Excavation at Night’ which, by way of a neat contrast, is dense and gloomy, the paint applied in thick, dark swathes.

The collection on display only numbers about 12 paintings, though what is there is quite diverse (portraits and action paintings as well as these landscapes). However, the dirt and smoke of the city which I’d read about these painters depicting was, apart from ‘Excavation at Night’, largely absent. I got the feeling the show only captured a small section of what the Ashcan school was known for, but it left me eager to see more.