George Bellows
Encyclopedia
George Wesley Bellows was an American realist
painter
, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City
, becoming, according to the Columbus Museum of Art
, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".
. He was an only child, born four years after his parents married, at the ages of fifty and forty respectively. His mother, Anna Wilhelmina Smith, was the daughter of a whaling captain.
Belows 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, on Broadway
.
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.
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.
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.
He was also criticized for some of the liberties he took in capturing scenes of war. The artist Joseph Pennell
argued that because Bellows had not witnessed the events he painted firsthand, he had no right to paint them. Bellows responded that he had not been aware that Leonardo da Vinci
had "had a ticket to paint the Last Supper
".
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, and The Hyde Collection, in Glens Falls, NY. The Columbus Museum of Art
in Bellows' hometown also has a sizeable collection of both his portraits and New York street scenes.
The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College
holds his papers.
27.5 million to billionaire Bill Gates
.
In November 2008, Bellows's Men of the Docks a 1912 painting of the Brooklyn docks
spanning the East River
and depicting the Manhattan
skyline in the background, was to be auctioned at Christie's
in New York. It was expected to set the record for an American painting sold at auction with an estimate of $25–35 million.
The painting's sale however was a source of controversy at Randolph College because it was the first masterpiece purchased for the Maier Museum of Art by students and locals who scraped together $2,500 to purchase it in 1920. Due to a series of lawsuits and the deflated art market; the painting remains unsold and in limbo.
American realism
300px|thumb|[[Ashcan School]] artists & friends at [[John French Sloan]]'s Philadelphia Studio, 1898American realism was an early 20th century idea in art, music and literature that showed through these different types of work, reflections of the time period...
painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, becoming, according to the Columbus Museum of Art
Columbus Museum of Art
The Columbus Museum of Art is an art museum located in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Formed in 1878 as the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, it was the first art museum to register its charter with the state of Ohio.-Building:...
, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".
Youth
Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, OhioColumbus, Ohio
Columbus is the capital of and the largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio. The broader metropolitan area encompasses several counties and is the third largest in Ohio behind those of Cleveland and Cincinnati. Columbus is the third largest city in the American Midwest, and the fifteenth largest city...
. He was an only child, born four years after his parents married, at the ages of fifty and forty respectively. His mother, Anna Wilhelmina Smith, was the daughter of a whaling captain.
Belows attended The Ohio State University
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...
from 1901 until 1904. There he played for the baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
and basketball
Basketball
Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules...
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
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
to study art.
Bellows was soon a student of Robert Henri
Robert Henri
Robert Henri was an American painter and teacher. He was a leading figure of the Ashcan School in art.- Early life :...
at the New York School of Art, and became associated with Henri's "The Eight
The Eight
The Eight may refer to:*Ashcan School, an American school of painters*The Eight , a Hungarian art movement*The Eight ...
" and the Ashcan School
Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement grew out of a group...
, a group of artists who advocated painting contemporary American society in all its forms. By 1906, Bellows was renting his own studio, on Broadway
Broadway (New York City)
Broadway is a prominent avenue in New York City, United States, which runs through the full length of the borough of Manhattan and continues northward through the Bronx borough before terminating in Westchester County, New York. It is the oldest north–south main thoroughfare in the city, dating to...
.
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 YorkArt Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...
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.
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
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
in their extreme advocacy of individual rights. He taught at the first Modern School
Modern School (United States)
The Modern Schools, also called Ferrer Schools, were United States schools, established in the early twentieth century, that were modeled after the Escuela Moderna of Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, the Catalan educator and anarchist...
in New York City (as did his mentor, Henri), and served on the editorial board of the socialist journal, The Masses
The Masses
The Masses was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the U.S. from 1911 until 1917, when Federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later The New 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
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. In 1918, he created a series of lithographs and paintings that graphically depicted the atrocities committed by Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
during its invasion of Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
. 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.
He was also criticized for some of the liberties he took in capturing scenes of war. The artist Joseph Pennell
Joseph Pennell
Joseph Pennell was an American artist and author.-Biography:Born in Philadelphia, and first studied there, but like his compatriot and friend, James McNeill Whistler, he afterwards went to Europe and made his home in London...
argued that because Bellows had not witnessed the events he painted firsthand, he had no right to paint them. Bellows responded that he had not been aware that Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
had "had a ticket to paint the Last Supper
Last Supper
The Last Supper is the final meal that, according to Christian belief, Jesus shared with his Twelve Apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. The Last Supper provides the scriptural basis for the Eucharist, also known as "communion" or "the Lord's Supper".The First Epistle to the Corinthians is...
".
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
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
in 1919. In 1920, he began to spend nearly half of each year in Woodstock, New York
Woodstock, New York
Woodstock is a town in Ulster County, New York, United States. The population was 5,884 at the 2010 census, down from 6,241 at the 2000 census.The Town of Woodstock is in the northern part of the county...
, where he built a home for his family. He died on January 8, 1925 in New York City, of peritonitis
Peritonitis
Peritonitis is an inflammation of the peritoneum, the serous membrane that lines part of the abdominal cavity and viscera. Peritonitis may be localised or generalised, and may result from infection or from a non-infectious process.-Abdominal pain and tenderness:The main manifestations of...
, after failing to tend to a ruptured appendix
Vermiform appendix
The appendix is a blind-ended tube connected to the cecum , from which it develops embryologically. The cecum is a pouchlike structure of the colon...
. 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
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
in Washington, DC, the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, and the Whitney
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
and the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York, and The Hyde Collection, in Glens Falls, NY. The Columbus Museum of Art
Columbus Museum of Art
The Columbus Museum of Art is an art museum located in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Formed in 1878 as the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, it was the first art museum to register its charter with the state of Ohio.-Building:...
in Bellows' hometown also has a sizeable collection of both his portraits and New York street scenes.
The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College
Amherst College
Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...
holds his papers.
Posthumous sales
In December 1999, Polo Crowd, a 1910 painting, sold for U.S. $United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
27.5 million to billionaire Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
.
In November 2008, Bellows's Men of the Docks a 1912 painting of the Brooklyn docks
Dock (maritime)
A dock is a human-made structure or group of structures involved in the handling of boats or ships, usually on or close to a shore.However, the exact meaning varies among different variants of the English language...
spanning the East River
East River
The East River is a tidal strait in New York City. It connects Upper New York Bay on its south end to Long Island Sound on its north end. It separates Long Island from the island of Manhattan and the Bronx on the North American mainland...
and depicting the Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
skyline in the background, was to be auctioned at Christie's
Christie's
Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...
in New York. It was expected to set the record for an American painting sold at auction with an estimate of $25–35 million.
The painting's sale however was a source of controversy at Randolph College because it was the first masterpiece purchased for the Maier Museum of Art by students and locals who scraped together $2,500 to purchase it in 1920. Due to a series of lawsuits and the deflated art market; the painting remains unsold and in limbo.
External links
- Artcyclopedia list of works by George Bellows online
- An American Pulse: The Lithographs of George Bellows, San Diego Museum of Art
- The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library, exhibited at the Frick
- George Bellows Gallery at MuseumSyndicate
- The Boston Public Library's George Wesley Bellows set on Flickr.com
- Bellows Papers, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
- The Barricade at the Birmingham Museum of ArtBirmingham Museum of ArtFounded in 1951, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama today has one of the finest collections in the Southeast US, with more than 24,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and decorative arts representing a numerous diverse cultures, including Asian, European, American,...