A Comprehensive Look at George Bellows

The subject, while shocking, had currency, feeding off Jack London’s writings and Teddy Roosevelt’s training as a boxer and wrestler. But Bellows was, at the same time, interested in painting more refined scenes, like Manhattanites strolling through Riverside Park and posh society folk taking in the tennis at Newport’s shingled casino.

Violence, however, is an undercurrent in many of Bellows’ works. His paintings and lithographs of reported German atrocities against Belgian civilians during World War I are well known and well represented in the current exhibition. But most viewers are probably unaware that almost half of Bellows’ work is comprised of marine and sea views, the majority painted during four summers (1911, 1913, 1914, and 1916) in Maine and especially offshore Monhegan Island. Human violence takes a back seat to nature’s violence as churning seas and waves come crashing ashore in a multitude of pictures from this period.

The last two rooms of this expansive show are devoted to comparatively serene portraits of friends and family. Bellows married Emma Louise Story in 1910, an art student that he met shortly after his arrival in New York. They had two daughters and lived in a Federal brick row house on East 19th Street and owned a country house in Woodstock in the Catskills. For an artist intent on blowing up the art world and defying convention, he had a quite conventional personal life.

Almost one-third of his portraits are of family members, and the ones of his wife, to whom he was extremely devoted, are quite arresting. Portraits were one of the mainstays of his career; he painted them from the time he arrived in the city up until his death. As M. Melissa Wolfe writes in the catalogue’s chapter on portraiture: “His portraits may not be as sensational as his urban scenes, but they are equally dynamic and experimental … It is, for instance, the genre through which he most explicitly engaged in his dialogue with the grand tradition of Western art.”

Case in point: Emma and Her Children (1923), a formal portrait of Emma seated on a Victorian loveseat with daughters Anne and Jean. As the museum’s label helpfully explains (with the aid of an illustration), the painting’s subject and composition bear a strong resemblance to Renoir’s Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe and Paul-Emile-Charles (1878). Bellows clearly studied Renoir’s masterpiece at The Metropolitan Museum (which had acquired it in 1907, three years after his arrival in the city) and was strongly influenced by it. But the seriousness of the subjects’ facial expressions and dark palette suggest a debt to the Old Masters as well.

The show’s finale is edgy and marks a return to one of Bellows’ favorite subjects, boxing. On the last wall of the last gallery hangs Dempsey and Firpo (1924), an iconic image of Jack Dempsey being knocked out of the ring in the first round by Argentine challenger Luis Angel Firpo (Dempsey went on to victory in round two of the championship fight at New York’s Polo Grounds). A tour de force, Dempsey and Firpo pays tribute to the “Machine Age aesthetic and Art Deco sleekness” of the twenties, the curators inform us. The images are polished and refined and stand in stark contrast to the spontaneous, impressionistic style of Stag at Sharkey’s.

The contrast is a fitting testament to Bellows’ approach to art, which he once summed up quite succinctly:

Try everything that can be done.

Be deliberate. Be spontaneous.

Be thoughtful and painstaking.

Be abandoned and impulsive.

Learn your own possibilities.

Paintings courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Emma in the Purple Dress, 1919; oil on panel. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gift of Raymond J. Margaret Horowitz

Stag at Sharkey's, 1909; oil on canvas. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection

Dempsey and Firpo, 1924; on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

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A Comprehensive Look at George Bellows

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