Modern Age
George Bellows (1882–1925)
American Ashcan School painter.
George Bellows was the most forceful painter of the Ashcan generation, a Columbus-born athlete who came to New York in 1904, studied under Robert Henri, and made prizefights, tenements, and the Hudson's winter docks his subject. He was not one of The Eight in 1908, but he was Henri's star pupil and the youngest artist elected to the National Academy in years.
'A Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' (both 1909) treat illegal and club boxing as modern history painting: bodies as slashing, meaty paint. 'Cliff Dwellers' (1913) turns a Lower East Side street into a vertical human cliff. He also made a fierce lithographic series on the First World War. He died suddenly of appendicitis in 1925, aged forty-two.
The 2012 National Gallery of Art exhibition organized by Charles Brock remains the standard modern survey of the boxing pictures, the city, and the late Maine summers.
The words the record keeps using: forceful, urban, athletic, brutal, democratic, rapid.
At a glance
- Lived 1882–1925
- Origin American
- Worked in New York
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Ashcan School
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Impasto, Alla prima (wet-in-wet)
Works in the archive
- Stag at Sharkey's, 1909 (Cleveland Museum of Art)
Two fighters collide under the lamp at Sharkey's Athletic Club, an illegal 'stag' bout, the crowd a ring of open mouths and hats. Bellows's most famous boxing picture, it treats the prizefight as a modern history… - Both Members of This Club, 1909 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
A Black fighter drives into a white opponent under the same Sharkey's lamp; the title's irony is that neither man would have been admitted to a respectable club — only to this illegal ring. Painted the same year as Stag… - Cliff Dwellers, 1913 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
A Lower East Side street in summer is packed with stoops, laundry, and children, the tenements rising like a cliff of windows. Bellows's most famous city picture, it treats immigrant density as a landscape — the Ashcan…
What was said
Brock's National Gallery catalogue presents the boxing pictures and Cliff Dwellers as Bellows's claim that prizefights and tenement streets were modern American history painting — painted with an athlete's force learned from Henri.
Under Robert Henri in New York, Bellows absorbed the Ashcan creed of painting the life around him with rapid, loaded oil — a method he then pushed toward the slashing bodies of Sharkey's.
The Sharkey's canvases treat illegal and club boxing as a public subject — including the racial charge of Both Members of This Club — rather than as sporting anecdote.
Lineage
Learned from John Sloan, Käthe Kollwitz
What would George make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after George Bellows", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with George · Keep a life moment the way George would · Pictures made after George