42 Kids 1907
George Bellows was once a revolutionary like his fellows in the Eight and the Ashcan School, braving the wrath of a conservative establishment. These days he’s largely relegated to a pre-modernist narrative past, but the retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington should return some of his glory. Bellows is a superb storyteller, at his best among the rough and tumble world of New York streets of his early work.
Stag at Sharkey's 1909
His tales tell of poor lives full of love, hope, and despair; his most famous work is the swaggering ‘Stag at Sharkey’s, one of several fierce, bloody fight scenes he conjured out of the grimy go-for-broke arena of a basement men’s club. Bellows is magnificent here; swabbing paint with broad impulsive strokes, as much an athlete of his craft as his fighters are of their murderous sport. He slathers his main characters with light, giving their pasty flesh an aura that lifts them into an ancient class of warriors. They could be Ajax and Hector, heroes in the thick of the Trojan wars. The scene around them, however, is anything but noble; it stinks of human greed and the low pleasures of violence. I was struck repeatedly by Bellows’s links to Daumier, the great 19th century satirist. The faces leering up at the fighters have a demonic charm that is pure Daumier, who amused his audience while sticking sharp barbs into the fat cats of his day. Bellows is not outright political like Daumier was, but he gets his points across when he needs to.
Excavation at Night 1908
A series of paintings showing the building of Penn Station leaves no doubt about the relationship between the poor buggers doing the hard work and the city that rises up beyond the pit. The work is hard, dirty, and endless – one scene shows dawn breaking as men gather for a long day, another the small fire of someone keeping watch in the dark of night. With his extraordinary technique and instinct for just enough detail, Bellows tells an eternal story – it could be coal mines in Wales, diamond mines in South Africa – any place where the poor and weak do the bidding of the powerful.
Beach at Coney Island 1908
But luckily for us, and him too, I imagine, he also has a rollicking sense of joy in life that comes across in work like 42 Kids, and Beach at Coney Island. Daumier is once again present in the gleeful, mischievous faces and gestures, and Bruegel’s there too, delighting in the human gaggle of good plain honest fun. Marvels abound – the clustered crowd at the Beach has an organic truth - the figures seem to be made of the sun and sand that surround them - and the skinny little lad launched headfirst into the black waters of the Hudson in 42 Kids is a flick of perfect animated perspective.
 River Rats 1906 | 
Albrecht Durer: St Michal and the Dragon 1498
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One of my favorites in the exhibition is River Rats, a masterful composition of almost Biblical force, a complex story told in a few strokes of bright light and great expanses conveying a sense of forces beyond knowing. The tiny figures and the two little houses surrounded by darkness, bring to mind Durer's Saint Michael and the Dragon, where human life goes on unmindful of danger while good and evil battle it out above the earth.
Emma and her Children 1923
The exhibition continues on into Bellow’s years in Maine and later, as a journalist and then with his family in Woodstock. He continues to create impressive compositions, and some beautiful work. His portraits are particularly interesting, among them some poignant pictures of street kids. Those of his family are beautiful and clearly meaningful, but he never tops what he did in New York. There was an affinity there, something about the urban grit, the metaphors he put to good use, the crowded ordinary lives, that just doesn’t come across after he moves on. The paintings and lithographs he did based on reports of German atrocities in WWI are meant to be powerful statements but, although they contain the passion and humanity present in the early paintings they ring false in comparison. The buzz of daily rights and wrongs, large and small, was, it seems, his best inspiration for telling a significant human story though his art.
The George Bellows exhibit is at the National Gallery, Washington, until October 8, 2012
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/bellowsinfo.shtm
The George Bellows exhibit is at the National Gallery, Washington, until October 8, 2012
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/bellowsinfo.shtm
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