George Wesley Bellows (August 12, or August 19, 1882 - January 8, 1925)
was an American painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York
City. At a young age he was to become "the most acclaimed artist of his
generation".
George Wesley Bellows (August 12, or August 19, 1882 - January 8, 1925) was
an American painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York
City. At a young age he was to become "the most acclaimed artist of his
generation".
Youth
Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio. He attended The Ohio State University from
1901 until 1904. There he played for the baseball and basketball teams, and
provided illustrations for the Makio, the school's student yearbook. He was
encouraged to become a professional baseball player,[and he worked as a
commercial illustrator while a student and he continued to accept magazine
assignments throughout his life. Despite these opportunities in athletics and
commercial art, Bellows desired success as a painter. He left Ohio State in 1904
just before he was to graduate and moved to New York City to study art.
Bellows was soon a student of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art, and
became associated with Henri's "The Eight" and the Ashcan School, a group of
artists who advocated painting contemporary American society in all its forms.By
1906, Bellows was renting his own studio.
New York
Bellows first achieved notice in 1908, when he and other pupils of Henri
organized an exhibition of mostly urban studies. While many critics considered
these to be crudely painted, others found them welcomely audacious and a step
beyond the work of his teacher. Bellows taught at the Art Students League of New
York in 1909, although he was more interested in pursuing a career as a painter.
His fame grew as he contributed to other nationally recognized juried shows.
New York (1911)Bellows' urban New York scenes depicted the crudity and chaos of
working-class people and neighborhoods, and also satirized the upper classes.
From 1907 through 1915, he executed a series of paintings depicting New York
City under snowfall. These paintings were the main testing ground in which
Bellows developed his strong sense of light and visual texture. These exhibited
a stark contrast between the blue and white expanses of snow and the rough and
grimy surfaces of city structures, and created an aesthetically ironic image of
the equally rough and grimy men struggling to clear away the nuisance of the
pure snow. However, Bellows' series of paintings portraying amateur boxing
matches were arguably his signature contribution to art history. These paintings
are characterized by dark atmospheres, through which the bright, roughly lain
brushstrokes of the human figures vividly strike with a strong sense of motion
and direction.
Social and political themes
Growing prestige as a painter brought changes in his life and work. Though he
continued his earlier themes, Bellows also began to receive portrait
commissions, as well as social invitations, from New York's wealthy elite.
Additionally, he followed Henri's lead and began to summer in Maine, painting
seascapes on Monhegan and Matinicus islands.
At the same time, the always socially conscious Bellows also associated with a
group of radical artists and activists called "the Lyrical Left", who tended
towards anarchism in their extreme advocacy of individual rights. He taught at
the first Modern School in New York City (as did his mentor, Henri), and served
on the editorial board of the socialist journal, The Masses, to which he
contributed many drawings and prints beginning in 1911. However, he was often at
odds with the other contributors because of his belief that artistic freedom
should trump any ideological editorial policy. Bellows also notably dissented
from this circle in his very public support of U.S. intervention in World War I.
In 1918, he created a series of lithographs and paintings that graphically
depicted the atrocities committed by Germany during its invasion of Belgium.
Notable among these was The Germans Arrive, which was based on an actual account
and gruesomely illustrated a German soldier restraining a Belgian teen whose
hands had just been severed. However, his work was also highly critical of the
domestic censorship and persecution of anti-war dissenters conducted by the U.S.
government under the Espionage Act.
Both Members of This Club (1909)
Oil on canvas, 45 1/4 x 63 1/8 in. (115 x 160.5 cm)
National Gallery of Art
Later life
As Bellows' later oils focused more on domestic life, with his wife and
daughters as beloved subjects, the paintings also displayed an increasingly
programmatic and theoretical approach to color and design, a marked departure
from the fluid muscularity of the early work.
In addition to painting, Bellows made significant contributions to lithography,
helping to expand the use of the medium as a fine art in the U.S. He installed a
lithography press in his studio in 1916, and between 1921 and 1924 he
collaborated with master printer Bolton Brown on more than a hundred images.
Bellows also illustrated numerous books in his later career, including several
by H.G. Wells.
Bellows taught at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1919. In 1920, he began to
spend nearly half of each year in Woodstock, New York, where he built a home for
his family. He died on January 8, 1925 in New York City, of
peritonitis, after failing to tend to a ruptured appendix. He was survived by
his wife, Emma, and two daughters, Anne and Jean.
Paintings and prints by George Bellows are in the collections of many major
American art museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC,
the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York,
and the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Columbus Museum of
Art in Bellows' hometown also has a sizeable collection of both his portraits
and New York street scenes.
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