Mean Streets: George Bellows at the Met. (2/3/13)
If you’re in New York in the next two weeks, make sure to check out the George Bellows retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you’re not, make sure to give Bellows more than a quick Google Image search. Otherwise, you’re missing out on one of the great forgotten American painters.
Bellows painted the streets and the people who lived in them and his best subjects are boxers and street kids, dock workers and huckster preachers. Like New York, a city he often portrayed, Bellows’ work is occasionally down and dirty, but always full of life. His paintings are more than snapshots of a time (the 1910s and 20s) and place. They make you feel like you’re there, like it’s still happening.
To paint this modern, urban life, Bellows took from the greats of classical painting, much as Scorsese borrows from the classics of American European film to make his distinctly American films. For instance, Bellows used classical modes of composition throughout his career (I see the Golden Section everywhere, though that may have more to do with my own personal obsession). It’s not hard to see the influence of Spanish court painter Diego Velasquez in Bellows’ murky backgrounds and un-sanitized likenesses. (Velasquez’s “Lezcano” on the left, Bellows’ “Paddy Flanagan” on the right).
Fittingly, Bellows was introduced to a lot of his influences in museums like the Met, which he visited as an art student. Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1882, Bellows had shown a talent for both baseball and art. He chose art. In 1904 Bellows dropped out of Ohio State and moved to New York to study art. He studied with Robert Henri, one of the most influential art teachers in America at the time. Henri told his students to get out into the streets and draw them. He forced them to work quickly, in an immediate, sketchy style. “Paint with honesty,” Henri told his students, “not cleverness.” But he wasn’t a teach-if-you-can’t-do type.
(Robert Henri’s 1917 “The Goat Herder”)
Robert Henri was a portrait painter and part of The Eight, a group of American artists who made a splash at a 1908 group show in New York. The Eight wanted to show the realities of normal life in their work. For the most part, they focused on the everyday life and leisure time of the urban poor. That’s not to say they were grim documents of poverty. The poor in these pictures are too busy working and laughing and bustling through the streets.
Henri was a central figure in what became known as the Ashcan School, a loose grouping of young American artist which included George Bellows. Like most movements, the Ashcan school was rebelling against the status quo. In this case, the status quo was American Impressionism, itself inspired by the French variety. The Ashcan artists preferred shadow to light and tenements to orchards. And what a time for tenements! The city was where life was happening and New York was the biggest and most lively (still is, I say).
Bellows often painted New York and New Yorkers and in fact Bellows’ paintings of New York make up almost a third of the Met’s exhibit. His 1911 New York shows a busy intersection, clogged with traffic and crowds, the air grey and smoky. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Men of the Docks (1912) takes us down to the docks on the Brooklyn side of the Hudson on a cold winter day. His Forty-Two Kids (1907) shows an unruly group of boys playing on the Manhattan side. Fifty years later they’d be playing in the streets, running through the spray from an open fire hydrant.
Now it’s time to go downstairs, to a members-only prize-fight at Tom Sharkey’s Athletic Club on Broadway and 66th, across the street from the artist’s studio. It’s here that we find Bellows’ most famous picture, and one of his best, A Stag at Sharkey’s (1909). The skin of the two boxers looks like raw meat, their bodies slamming together in an angry red. The crowd is full of flushed-faced men, chomping cigars and cheering for their man.
The last painting in the retrospective is Dempsey and Firpo (1924). It’s hard not to compare it to Sharkey’s, considering the similar subject matter (boxing) and composition. The two serve as bookends to Bellows’ career. Compared to Sharkey’s it looks stiff and second-hand, like it was carefully referenced from photographs. There’s a flat, more design-y, Art Deco feel to it. It lacks the dynamic energy and brushwork of the earlier work, like Bellows was starting to move away from honesty toward cleverness.
There will always be a sense of could-have-been about artists who die (relatively) young. Bellows passed away from a ruptured appendix on January 8, 1925, at the age of 42. He ignored the pain for three weeks, apparently, which is appropriate for a man of his time. He was buried in Green-Wood cemetery, Brooklyn.
But the rebels of the Ashcan School had already been rendered passé long before Bellows died. The 1913 Armory Show had sideswiped unsuspecting American Realists with the work of artists like Picasso and Matisse. Realism was yesterday’s news. Consequently, it’s hard to see any direct influence of either Bellows or the Ashcan school on subsequent American art.
The fame of one of Bellows’ classmates did last, however. His name was Edward Hopper, another student of Henri, but one who was never comfortable being grouped with the Ashcan artists. “The only read influence I’ve ever had was myself,” Hopper once said. 
Indeed, Hopper’s streets are pristine and his melancholy, twilight scenes aren’t urban realism in the same way that the paintings of Bellows or the others were. He did learn about classical composition somewhere though. His iconic Nighthawks (1942), for example, follows the Golden Section perfectly (I told you I was obsessed). Nonetheless, like the Ashcan artists, Hopper was interested in modern life and its effect on people.
In a time when cleverness rules (thanks Andy Warhol), maybe it’s time to remember what honesty looked like. Not a sober, grey honesty but a willingness to engage in life without hiding behind irony. George Bellows is a great place to start.
P.S.: Bellows also made a lot of great lithographs, which I didn’t talk about at all. Check them out.
P.P.S.: Here are some bonus pics to show how George Bellows used Golden Section (or how it looks like he did) in his compositions. Because I can’t resist.
OMH Writes 