Friday, April 10, 2020

The Ashcan School - George Bellows



George Bellows (1882–1925) was regarded as one of America’s greatest artists when he died, at the age of 42, from a ruptured appendix. His early fame rested on his powerful depictions of boxing matches and gritty scenes of New York City’s tenement life, but he also painted cityscapes, seascapes, war scenes, and portraits, and made illustrations and lithographs that addressed many of the social, political, and cultural issues of the day.  

Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, George Bellows attended Ohio State University, where his athletic talents suggested that he might become a professional baseball player and his illustrations for the student yearbook hinted at an artistic calling. In 1904, before graduating, he moved to New York City to study art with Robert Henri, one of America’s most influential teachers in the period. Bellows would become the leading young member of the Ashcan School artists, all of whom Henri inspired. The Ashcan artists aimed to chronicle the realities of daily life, and Bellows was the boldest and most versatile among them in his choice of subjects, palettes, and techniques. Bellows never traveled abroad, but learned the lessons of European masters—such as El Greco, Francisco de Goya, Édouard Manet, and others who nourished Ashcan realism—by studying their works in museums, including the Metropolitan. 




When, in 1911, the Metropolitan acquired his canvas Up the Hudson (1908) as its first Ashcan painting, Bellows became one of the youngest artists to be represented in the Museum’s collection. His candid portrayals of New York City, Maine’s rugged coast, boxers in the ring, the atrocities of World War I, friends and family members, and other distinctive themes are among the triumphs of early 20th-century art. 


Nearly a third of the exhibition is devoted to scenes of New York City. After painting several scenes of tenement kids enjoying themselves along the banks of Manhattan’s East River, Bellows turned to a popular destination for diverse crowds seeking relief from the summer’s heat on their day off from work. 



His Beach at Coney Island (1908, private collection) signals the relaxed moral codes associated with this locale on Brooklyn’s south shore. One leading critic described Bellows’s teeming view as “a distinctly vulgar scene,” not least because of the amorous couple shown embracing in the foreground. 



New York (1911, National Gallery of Art), one of Bellows’s few depictions of the heart of the city rather than its edges, captures the tumult of a busy intersection in winter. Looming skyscrapers obliterate all but a tiny patch of sky. Pedestrians of every social class scurry along the sidewalks. Horse-drawn carriages, delivery carts, and trolleys pack the streets. Men with shovels work to remove any trace of the recently fallen snow. 



Bellows maintained a lifelong interest in sports, and his many depictions of boxers in the ring are his most familiar and iconic works. Stag at Sharkey's (1909, Cleveland Museum of Art), depicts a prize fight at Tom Sharkey’s Athletic Club, a popular bar that was located directly across Broadway from Bellows’s studio at 66th Street. Because public prizefighting was illegal in New York at the time, club “members” could buy their way in each evening for a few dollars. The artist’s low vantage point places the viewer almost at ringside. 



The Hudson River and adjacent Riverside Park often inspired Bellows. For Rain on the River(1908, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design), the artist positioned himself on a rocky overlook and showed the river below shrouded in mist. A pedestrian navigates a flooded footpath, and smoke billows around a train that is pulling into a shed. Bellows’s contemporaries, who were accustomed to the light and sunny urban views favored by the American Impressionists, would have been startled by this gritty urban subject. 

As Bellows’s reputation grew, his experiences, subject interests, and social contacts expanded. Although many of his paintings concentrate on the world of work, he also recorded the leisure classes, who created a rich visual pageant as they enjoyed promenades in New York’s parks and other genteel activities.




He painted Polo at Lakewood (1910, Columbus Museum of Art) after attending a match on the estate of railroad tycoon Jay Gould, in Lakewood, New Jersey. Bellows was fascinated by the contrast between the game’s violence and the carefully groomed riders, ponies, and spectators. 






Bellows focused almost half of his oeuvre on marine and shore views, although these works are not as well-known as his city scenes. He completed Shore House (1911, private collection) — one of his earliest treatments of this sort of subject—from sketches he had made during his recent honeymoon in Montauk. This painting and others like it pay homage to Winslow Homer, some of whose New England seascapes were in the Metropolitan’s collection by 1911 and were available for study. Such works by Bellows, with their celebration of the sea and sense of isolation, remind us that he was a classmate of Edward Hopper (who was also born in 1882), another modern American realist who appreciated Homer’s achievements. 



In addition to being a gifted painter, Bellows was one of the most accomplished American lithographers. It is therefore not surprising that he executed the most forceful image of himself as a lithograph. 



His Self-portrait(1921, Collection of Max and Heidi Berry) shows him working on a lithographic stone in the balcony studio in his home on East 19th Street. The scalloped edges of the mirror in which he observes himself frame his reflection and remind us of the printmaker’s challenge: to draw in reverse the image he ultimately seeks. 

For example, the charismatic evangelist Billy Sunday preaching to a mass audience is the subject of four works created between 1915 and 1923 in various media. 



Billy Sunday 

Billy Sunday was a forceful, colorful American evangelist whose charisma simultaneously attracted and repelled Bellows. Here the artist objectively studies the relationship between the protagonist and crowd, complete with harsh gestures and sensationalism. Bellows’ composition emphasizes a geometric pictorial structure of horizontals and verticals, punctuated by Sunday’s violent lunge into the enthusiastic audience.



In 1918, Bellows made five large oils and 16 lithographs that recall alleged atrocities against civilians by the German army at the beginning of World War I. These works invoke the legacy of the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s famous depictions of the horrors of the battlefield, Disasters of War (1810–20), which were made a century earlier in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. Goya’s prints were often on display in New York and Bellows would have been aware of them. 



In Massacre at Dinant (1918, Greenville County Museum of Art), Bellows refers to the mass murder of 674 civilians by German troops in Belgium. Although the soldiers are barely visible, their bloody bayonets and rifles appear at the left. The bodies of dead women and children fill the foreground, and helpless clergy are shown in the center. Shockingly brutal, Bellows’s war images still resonate with viewers today. 

Bellows painted many portraits of women that offer a compelling counterpoint to the violent, predominantly male world that he recorded in his better-known boxing canvases. Bellows’s wife Emma was his artistic muse and he painted her in many guises. He wrote passionately to her: “Can I tell you that your heart is in me and your portrait is in all my work? What can a man say to a woman who absorbs his whole life?” 

During what were to be the last years of his life, Bellows spent the summers in Woodstock, New York, a rural arts community in the Catskill Mountains. There he communed with nature, the local townspeople, and a close circle of family and artist-friends. His most important works from the period were the monumental figure paintings he executed with old-master grandeur. Traditional in subject and highly organized in structure, they often referenced well-known paintings that he knew from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection or had seen in reproductions. 



Emma and her Children (1923, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) shows his wife and two daughters elegantly attired, sitting on a sofa in an arrangement that calls to mind Auguste Renoir’s Madame Charpentier and her Children, Georgette-Berthe and Paul-Émile-Charles, which entered the Metropolitan’s collection in 1907. Painting this monumental portrait just weeks after his mother died, Bellows enlisted a somber palette and stoic poses that invoke the Old Master canvases he admired more than the lightness of Impressionism.



Dempsey and Firpo (1924, Whitney Museum of American Art), the boxing scene that ends the exhibition, was Bellows’s last masterpiece. It embodies the era’s Machine Age aesthetic and Art Deco sleekness. The questions it raises about a new beginning for his art were, however, never answered. On January 8, 1925, Bellows died from a ruptured appendix. 



Tennis at Newport is one of only four depictions of the sport that George Bellows painted, two of which are in major museum collections. The canvas shows a tennis match on the iconic horse-shoe grass court at the Newport Casino, which Bellows visited in 1919 while summering with his wife in Middletown, Rhode Island. Inspired by the sport and the elegant crowd, the artist painted two scenes of the tournament in 1919, one of which is currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. Unsatisfied with the composition, he then completed two new works in 1920 - one of which is the present painting, while the other is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The American author Sherwood Anderson concluded that the artist’s last paintings “keep telling you things. They are telling you that Mr. George Bellows died too young. They are telling you that he was after something, that he was always after it.” 



George Wesley Bellows, one of the country’s most celebrated twentieth-century artists, is especially known for his controversial boxing images and evocative urban scenes. His career, although brief, was dazzling. An avid athlete, Bellows played shortstop for the Buckeyes before leaving Columbus in 1904 to study art in New York City. Within five years the young artist had taken the American art world by storm, winning every major award and rising from art student to acclaimed luminary.



“Stag at Sharkey’s”

He was a college dropout at twenty-two, a member of the prestigious National Academy at twenty-seven, the country’s most important lithographer at thirty-five, and tragically dead from a ruptured appendix at forty-three. In these twenty-one years of professional life, Bellows created an enormous body of work that conveyed his lively sense of humor, his seemingly effortless talent, and his political and social sensibilities. Bellows captured the essence of his subjects and delivered it to his viewers with perception, compassion, and, occasionally outrage.



George Bellows
Blue Snow, The Battery
Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase: Howald Fund
Bellows - New York



'Blue Snow, The Battery' (1910, Columbus Museum of Art) depicts the 25-acre public park immediately adjacent to Wall Street at the tip of Lower Manhattan. The bustling Port of New York and New Jersey lies nearby but little of it is evident. Rather, the city is shrouded in snow and it seems as if sounds are muted.



George Bellows
New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon 



However, Bellows did paint the urban construction of New York City and

'Excavation at Night' (1908, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas) is one of a series of images Bellows made of the building work at the site of Pennsylvania Station. This picture has a long art-historical lineage behind it, recalling the paintings of light-in-darkness by the 18th-century artist Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’. Bellows’s early 20th-century version capitalises on the compositional and aesthetic means developed by the artists of the sublime, like Wright and Turner, to describe the urban scene.

In the 1910s Bellows increasingly embraced non-urban subject matter, and he spent considerable time on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. 




Here he painted one of his most audacious images, 'The Big Dory' (1913, New Britain Museum of American Art), which anticipates the stylisations of Art Deco a generation later.



Forty-Two Kids (1907, Corcoran Gallery of Art), 




Both Members of This Club, 1909, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chester Dale Collection



Snow Dumpers (1911, Columbus Museum of Art).




The Big Dory (1913, New Britain Museum of American Art) are among Bellows' most important seascapes and pay homage to his great American predecessor, Winslow Homer (1836–1910). 






and The White Horse (1924, Worcester Art Museum), will prompt visitors to contemplate the artist Bellows might have become had he lived into the 1960s, as did his friend and contemporary Edward Hopper (1882–1967). 
















Bonhams' November 19 American Art auction will feature one of the last figural works by prominent early 20th century American artist George Bellows. Two Women, an allegorical work referencing a Renaissance masterpiece by Titian, is estimated at $1,000,000 – 1,500,000.


Bellows' early artistic career was hugely inspired by New York City's dynamic hustle and bustle. He studied under the avant-garde tutelage of Robert Henri where he learned to observe and portray everyday aspects modern American life - a deviation from popular academic painting and Impressionism. Bellows embraced capturing contemporary events before turning to historical and allegorical compositions.

Painted in 1924, a year before Bellows' sudden death, Two Women is an unorthodox homage to Titian's Sacred and Profane Love (ca. 1514). Titan's iconic canvas portrays a clothed woman sitting at a water fountain beside a nude Venus. Two Women's nude and clothed female subjects evoke this image, except for the fact that they are placed in the parlor of Bellows' own home in Woodstock, New York. The women—perhaps one pure and one worldly—look to their right, ignoring the viewer. Bellows includes a variety of compositional juxtapositions resulting in a successful, balanced composition in terms of color and form.


The painting has been widely exhibited at numerous galleries and prestigious museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.

The National Gallery February  2014





The National Gallery in London has purchased George Bellows' 1912 painting "Men of the Docks" for $25.5 million. 
The painting has resided for many years at the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College in Virginia. The sale was part of a controversial decision by college leaders to deaccession certain works of art in order to shore up its finances.
Museum leaders around the country had condemned the college's decision to deaccession art for the purposes of funding other operations. The decision also riled students and some faculty at the college.
The National Gallery said Friday that money to purchase the painting came from a fund established by the late John Paul Getty Jr. -- son of J. Paul Getty -- as well as from anonymous source.

The Huntington Library April 29, 2014





George Bellows (1882–1925), Summer Fantasy, 1924, oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens announced today it has purchased two major paintings by transformative 20th-century American artists: Lattice and Awning by Arthur Dove (1880–1946) and Summer Fantasy by George Bellows (1882–1925). Summer Fantasy is a late-career landscape that enhances The Huntington’s representation of Bellows’ work.

Summer Fantasy (1924) by George Bellows
George Bellows is perhaps most famous for his gritty depictions of early 20th-century New York urban life, including the iconic boxing picture A Stag at Sharkey's (represented in The Huntington’s collections by the celebrated lithograph of the subject). But he was equally adept at portraits (represented at The Huntington by a painting of his half sister, Laura) and landscapes. “In fact,” said Salatino, “Bellows is one of the greatest landscape painters in the history of American art.”

Summer Fantasy is a dream-like landscape made in the year before the artist’s premature death at the age of 42. It depicts a verdant park scene of ladies with parasols and long flowing dresses, riders on cantering horses, and a golden sun brilliantly reflected in the surface of an idealized Hudson River. Rendered in the artist’s characteristic late style, the painting is a field of riotous, highly keyed color. Its design, though constructed according to a rigorous formal system, is lively and rhythmic. 

“On a deeper level,” Salatino said, “the work may be interpreted as an allegory of life. Its imagery subtly moves from birth to maturity to death, all within the confines of a pleasant day’s outing in the park. Nevertheless, Summer Fantasy is ravishingly beautiful and life enhancing, ironically a work of remarkable optimism, given that it's one of Bellows’ last paintings.” 

The picture’s balanced, almost classical, compositional structure, eccentric coloring, free brushwork, and dramatic contrasts of light and shade make it a masterpiece of the artist's final years according to Salatino. A work looking simultaneously back to the great traditions of Old Master painting and forward to the modernism that would define 20th-century American art, Summer Fantasy is, said Salatino, “a summation of the artist's tragically truncated career pointing to new and fascinating directions never fully realized.” 



Christie's Dec. 5, 2013


GEORGE WESLEY BELLOWS (1882-1925)

EVENING SWELL


George Wesley Bellows’ Evening Swell (estimate: $5,000,000-7,000,000) is a superb example of George Wesley Bellows’ large-scale depictions of the rugged Maine coast and an important and evocative painting that demonstrates the artist at the height of his abilities.  The work exemplifies the theme of struggle, which is prevalent throughout Bellows’ oeuvre, whether in the boxing ring, on the city streets or, in this case, in savage nature.   Evening Swell was painted in 1911, after Bellows accompanied fellow artists Robert Henri and Randall Davey to Monhegan, Maine.  His bold, vigorous brushwork, which often approaches pure abstraction, creates a complex seascape, emphasizing the forceful movement of the water against the heavily worked rocks.  The drama is heightened by the inclusion of the two fishermen in a boat, who are diminutive in the face of the raw power of nature.

Price Realized $7,893,000 

Estimate $5,000,000 - $7,000,000



Christie's 23 May 2013





George Wesley Bellows, 

Splinter Beach,
 crayon, ink and crayon wash over transfer lithograph, Executed in 1913
500,000-700,000

Sotheby's May 1, 2014





ESTIMATE 3,000 - 5,000
LOT SOLD 3,125 






GEORGE WESLEY BELLOWS

SWANN JUNE 13, 2013



GEORGE BELLOWS 
Sunday in the Park
Estimate $6,000 - $9,000
Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $14,400

Swann 2008



  • GEORGE BELLOWS 
    Elsie, Emma and Marjorie (second stone).
    Estimate $2,500 - $3,500
    Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $4,320



  • GEORGE BELLOWS 
    Admirations--Young Mans Fancy.
    Estimate $3,000 - $5,000
    Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $3,840

Swann 2005



  • GEORGE BELLOWS 
    Busines-Mens Bath
    Estimate $3,000 - $5,000
    Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $5,060



  • GEORGE BELLOWS 
    Legs of the Sea
    Estimate $2,500 - $3,500
    Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $2,760

Swann 2002



  • GEORGE BELLOWS 
    Landscape with a Dock
    Estimate $1,500 - $2,500
    Price Realized (with Buyer's Premium) $3,910




So too will Fisherman's Family (1923, private collection).

The Armory Show, 1913


In 1913, the American public was introduced to avant-garde European art styles at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the Lexington Avenue Armory and known as the Armory Show. Organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the Armory Show created a sensation; the controversial and radical art displayed there proved to be a watershed in the development of 20th-century American art.

The Armory Show was a transformative event in the history of art in America. Artists, critics, and the public were exposed to avant-garde Futurist, Cubist, and Fauve work by European artists that challenged America’s conservative outlook. Scandalous works like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase were lampooned in New York’s daily press. In Chicago, copies of Matisse paintings were burned and a mock trial was held, finding the artist guilty of ‘artistic murder’ and ‘general esthetic aberration.’ Many American artists responded favorably to the exhibition, developing progressive styles that helped lay the groundwork for America’s artistic predominance later in the century.