Today I commemorate the centenary of the death of one of the New York School of Art’s most famous and most accomplished alumni, George Wesley Bellows. In the first article outlining his career and art, I had reached the First World War when he was a pioneer of the Ashcan School. This article concludes the account.

During the war years, Bellows continued to paint scenes of working life. His Builders of Ships / The Rope is unusual, in depicting a brief revival in the building of wooden ships at a yard in Camden, Maine, during Bellows’ summer season painting there in 1916. A recurrent theme for paintings, wooden ship construction was even then a traditional craft, as celebrated here by Bellows.

For his Sand Cart from 1917, Bellows travelled to the coast of California, where he again caught working men engaged in manual labour, this time against a different coastal background. This painting was shown on his return to New York, where it was well-received by critics, who compared it with the coastal paintings of Winslow Homer.

Bellows was strongly opposed to the entry of the US into the First World War, and was horrified by the many stories of atrocities allegedly committed by German troops when they had entered Belgium. One, where the Germans had apparently used the local population as a ‘human shield’, he expressed in The Barricade (1918).

He had also been developing his skills of lithography, and in 1916 installed a press in his studio. From then on he produced increasing numbers of lithographs, many of which developed anti-war themes.

In the summers of 1918 and 1919, Bellows was in Middletown, Rhode Island, with his family. During the second of those he painted Three Children, which was installed in the Green Room of the The White House in 2007. The three children shown are believed to be Bellows’ two daughters and the son of a local farmer, although the painting is as much about the rich rolling countryside beyond them.

After the war, Bellows turned to more figurative and portrait painting, including this Nude with Fan (1920). This wasn’t his first nude: he painted that in 1906, and it has now become the second painting by Bellows to enter a British collection. This is remarkable though for its richly lit landscape vignette, a tradition going back to the northern Renaissance.

Tennis at Newport (1920) is one a series of paintings by Bellows in 1919-20 from sketches and studies made during summer tennis tournaments at the Newport Casino in Rhode Island. His interest is less in the sport taking place, and more in the social event surrounding it. This painting is set in the late afternoon, as the shadows grew long.

In 1920, he and his family started spending the whole summer in Woodstock, New York (State), and by 1922 they had a house and studio built there. Situated in the Catskill Mountains, this area had long been a favourite with US landscape painters.

Of all his paintings, I find his late landscapes the most moving and intriguing. He painted The White Horse (1922) on a farm near Woodstock. Seen in the fall colours of November, its effect is heightened by the light cast through broken shower clouds, making the white horse look almost supernatural.

In the 1920s, Bellows painted his family more, including this carefully-posed portrait of his wife, Emma Story. Emma in a Purple Dress (1920-23) proved one of his most challenging works, and he scraped sections such as the head repeatedly before he was content with them.

Bellows is perhaps best-known for his paintings and prints of boxing matches, many of them clandestine. Dempsey and Firpo (1924) shows a famous historic boxing match between the heavyweights Jack Dempsey, who had been world champion since 1919, and Luis Ángel Firpo, an Argentinian challenger. This took place in the Polo Grounds of New York City on 14 September 1923.

From the start of the first round, the fight was gripping in excitement, with Dempsey knocking Firpo down seven times. Towards the end of the first round, Dempsey was trapped against the ropes, and Firpo knocked him out of the ring, the moment that Bellows shows here. Dempsey finally knocked Firpo out late in the second round. This was made from contemporary press photographs.

Painted just a year before Bellows’ sudden death, his Summer Fantasy (1924) contrasts with almost all his preceding paintings. Using a formal and classical composition, he has brought together images of archetypes in a lush green park, with the Hudson River behind. Ladies in fine, flowing white dresses promenade with their husbands. Horses and their riders, some in the elegance of side-saddle, cross in the middle distance. The sails of boats on the river are backlit by the setting sun.

This has been interpreted as an allegory of life, going from the baby in the pram in the right foreground, through marriage, to the final years. But we will never know where it was going to lead Bellows’ brush in the future, because in the New Year of 1925, he suffered appendicitis, which he left untreated. This resulted in peritonitis, from which he died on 8 January, in New York City. He was only forty-two.

References

Wikipedia
H V Allison’s online catalogue raisonné

Brock C ed. (2012) George Bellows, Prestel. ISBN 978 3 7913 5187 2.

Tomorrow I commemorate the centenary of the death of one of the New York School of Art’s most famous and most accomplished alumni, George Wesley Bellows. In this first article outlining his career and art, I cover his early years before the First World War when he was a pioneer of the Ashcan School, and conclude tomorrow with his later years.

Born in 1882 and brought up in Columbus, Ohio, Bellows’ first choice of career was as a sportsman. He studied at the Ohio State University between 1901-04, where he played for its baseball and basketball teams, and worked as a commercial illustrator. His sporting background is unusual for a painter, and was to influence his art later.

Gardiner’s Bay from Sag Harbor (1899) is an early watercolour from his High School days, and shows this undeveloped little bay at the far eastern end of Long Island, where Bellows’ family returned for their summer vacations.

Bellows then decided to become a painter, left university just before he was due to graduate in 1904, and moved to New York, where he studied at the New York School of Art, mainly under Robert Henri.

When he was a student in New York in 1905, he painted Bethesda Fountain (Fountain in Central Park). It shows, in sombre earth colours, this central feature of Bethesda Terrace in New York’s Central Park, a local motif. This bronze statue was designed by Emma Stebbins, and in those days was still relatively new, having been unveiled in 1873. More properly known as The Angel of the Waters Fountain, it refers not to Bethesda, Maryland, but the biblical location.

By 1906, Bellows had set up a studio in Broadway Street with another student, and was busy recording life in New York City.

Forty-two Kids (1907) was one of the earliest recognisable works of what became known as the Ashcan School, and depicting the reality of city life in works “full of vitality and the actual life of the time”, in Robert Henri’s words. Here an incoherent gathering of street urchins and other kids has taken over a tumbledown wharf in East River for swimming, sunbathing, smoking, and generally hanging about. Although now used generally of children, at the time the word kids had a more specific meaning, referring to the unruly children of working class immigrants living in the tenements of Lower East Side. Bellows exhibited this painting the following year, and it was his first to be sold into a private collection.

Bellows’ views of New York are in stark contrast to the skyscrapers of Colin Campbell Cooper, although they were painting the city at the same time. Bellows’ Pennsylvania Station Excavation (c 1907-1908) shows the deep excavations made for the new station during the winter, caught in the last light of the day.

Excavation at Night (1908) is a nocturne, perhaps of the same site, again in the winter, with a patch of snow still on the ground.

In 1908, Bellows joined fellow students in organising an exhibition focussed on urban art. Some critics voiced concerns at the apparently crude style of his paintings, but others felt them to be suitably daring. He also started to spend his summers in Maine, following the examples set by William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri.

Bellows’ Haystacks and Barn was probably painted out in the Maine countryside during the summer of 1909.

Returning to the East River in New York, his The Bridge, Blackwell’s Island (1909) shows the Queensboro Bridge linking Manhattan with Queens. Its piers rest on Blackwell’s Island, now known as Roosevelt Island. This view was painted from the Manhattan end in December 1909, shortly after it had been opened. At the time it was the greatest cantilever bridge in the world.

From 1911, he associated with radical artists in the ‘lyrical Left’, and concentrated again on depicting the lot of working people.

New York (1911) balances the world of the people of New York with that of their buildings. It was shown that year in the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, in New York, and annually thereafter for the rest of Bellows’ career, but wasn’t sold until after his death.

Men of the Docks (1912) has the unique distinction of being the first major work of a US artist to be purchased by The National Gallery in London, which paid over $25 million for it in 2014. These labourers have arrived seeking work in the docks, in the depths of winter. The figures are seen against a backdrop of a cargo ship and grey skyscrapers behind.

Bellows’ famous Cliff Dwellers (1913) shows the largely immigrant population of tenements in Lower East Side, whose children featured in Forty-two Kids. In 1916 this was the first painting to be purchased by the county of Los Angeles for its new museum of art, where it remains today.

Rock Reef, Maine (1913) was painted when Bellows was out on the Maine coast.

References

Wikipedia
H V Allison’s online catalogue raisonné

Brock C ed. (2012) George Bellows, Prestel. ISBN 978 3 7913 5187 2.