George Bellows
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BELLOWS was the most important figure in a group that came to be called the Ash Can School. These men, like the Fauves in France, opened the century gustily, enjoying the satisfaction of revolt. But the American revolution was in subject matter. Its painters were realists, most of whom had worked as illustrators on the daily press. Their assault was against the proprieties, in the name of humanity and truth.
Bellows was as American as Theodore Roosevelt. He could convey action, he could throw limelight into his paintings. He could arrest attention. He was an athlete. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1882, he had a college career in baseball at Ohio State, and he took a natural interest in the prize ring long before burliness became a cult.
He came to New York to paint, studied under Robert Henri, and bettered his teacher's direct vision and attack. His genial instinct for leadership and success carried him to the fore, and he was soon abreast of his elders. The first painting he sold was his Forty-two Kids of 1907. His Stag at Sharkey's of the next year shows him at the height of his early innocent style when his painting had the characteristics of a sport. He was just twenty-three.
The times were to change radically. With the coming of the Armory Show in 1913 it was obvious that there was a new vanguard; heightened impact was no longer enough, and the battle was for ideas. Nothing daunted, Bellows reached for the new weapons and went in selfconsciously for structure.
Unfortunately, he equipped himself with Hambidge's Dynamic Symmetry and the play of muscles was succeeded by the clank. of armor. With Dynamic Symmetry, Bellows tended to lose himself in triangulation, his figures stiffened in semaphore gestures, his dynamism departed and his canvases became set pieces. But there were times when he animated the dead weight of theory through sheer strength, and his paintings turned into monuments of controlled power. The Dempsey and Firpo fight substitutes stylized tension for the mobility of the Stag at Sharkey's, and like the press camera, cuts an instant of glare out of time.
Bellows was perhaps at his best painting the women of his family--more tender, less declamatory--his floodlighting throwing a marvelous cohesion over the figures, and dramatizing the reality of flesh. He has to his credit the re-discovery of lithography, the perfect vehicle for his instinct for massed blacks and whites.
Bellows was always willing to vary his attack, to profit by spontaneity or to be thoughtful and painstaking. There was urgency, power, resource in his work and his essential youthfulness promised achievements ahead. He died suddenly in 1924. Already in 1930 Henry McBride was writing retrospectively. "Bellows had a simple and direct mind, not overly subtle, but the very directness of his thought made it impressive to his friends."
Bellows: I have no desire to destroy the past. I am deeply moved by the great works of former times, but I refuse to be limited by them.
There are no successful pictures without a geometrical basis.
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