George Bellows, one of the greatest American painters of the early twentieth century, was reared in a conservative Methodist household in Columbus, Ohio, but he dropped out of Ohio State University in 1904 to come to New York City with aspirations of becoming an artist. He soon fell under the influence of the artist Robert Henri, one of his teachers, who was gaining a reputation for artistic radicalism. Henri urged his students to avoid the conventional forms and subjects of academic art and to search the streets of the city for motifs closer to “real” life.
Bellows took his mentor’s instruction to heart. During the first decade of his career, he produced a stunning series of urban pictures that are related to his explorations of his adopted city and his efforts to comprehend it. Though he also painted portraits and landscapes throughout his career, it was these vigorously brushed early paintings—of life in the tenement districts of New York City, prizefights, and excavations for the new Pennsylvania Station—that established Bellows’s reputation and professional identity.
For his urban paintings, Bellows tended to select prominent, often newsworthy subjects that were discussed and pictured in the mass media. As a result, his images evoked particular associations in the minds of his contemporaries. For example, Bellows’s depictions of the Lower East Side made use of pictorial conventions widely familiar from reform-minded urban exposé photography. But images of poverty were far from commonplace in exhibitions at the National Academy of Design. Some saw these paintings, which brought the daily activities of New York City’s largely foreign-born working classes into the rarefied realm of fine art, as oppositional gestures. To their critics, these subjects implied a deliberate rejection of academic idealism and the tradition of cultural authority associated with it.
Bellows’s slashing painting technique and his frank, sometimes gritty urban subject matter cemented his membership in Henri’s circle, often labeled in the press as a band of “revolutionaries” who challenged convention and the National Academy of Design. That connection to the Henri circle did Bellows no harm, however, since their challenge to the outworn conventions of the academy was considered overdue by large segments of the art audience. Henri and his protégés attracted both praise and criticism for their stance, and considerable notoriety in either case.
Bellows often garnered more accolades than his colleagues, partly because of his brilliant technical facility and partly because the implicit meaning of his pictures was not revolutionary. The excavation paintings celebrated urbanization; the boxing pictures presented the sport as brutal and its fans as debased; his depictions of the Lower East Side conformed to a moralistic, middle-class view of poverty. When these paintings were first exhibited between 1907 and 1913, they seemed boldly defiant but at the same time reassuringly familiar. By melding the trappings of artistic radicalism with an approach to his subjects that reaffirmed traditional values and priorities, Bellows created a remarkable corpus of paintings exquisitely attuned to their time and to the often conflicting attitudes and preconceptions of many urban Americans.
Bellows’s ability to ingratiate himself to both progressives and conservatives fueled his rapid rise to prominence in the art world. Only four years after he arrived in New York City, one of his paintings was purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for its permanent collection, and in the following year, 1909, when he was just 26, Bellows was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design.
In 1913, the year Bellows became a full member of the academy, the Armory Show reconfigured the contemporary American art scene, and members of the Henri circle fell from the prominent positions they had occupied. Bellows, however, managed to preserve a devoted following during and after the advent of cubism and fauvism in spite of his allegiance to a premodernist, realist idiom. He produced fewer city scenes after 1913 and devoted more attention to landscapes and seascapes, and some of his late portraits of family members must be considered among his finest achievements.
