Term first used by Holger Cahill and Alfred Barr in Art in America (New York, 1934) and loosely applied to American urban realist painters. In particular it referred to those members of The Eight who shortly after 1900 began to portray ordinary aspects of city life in their paintings, for example George Luk's painting Closing the Café (1904; Utica, NY, Munson-Williams-Proctor Inst.). Rober Heri, John Sloan, William J Glackens, Everett Shinn and Luks were the core of an informal association of painters who, in reaction against the prevailing restrictive academic exhibition procedures, mounted a controversial independent exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries, New York (1908).