The Bellows Exhibition

...THE BELLOWS EXHIBITION By ANNA McCLURE SHOLL T HE memorial exhibition of the work of George Bellows--whose death in January, I925, dealt a heavy blow to the art-world--fully demon-strates that he was a leader and explorer, enjoying to the utmost the freedom of the gospel, rather than a close follower of academic rulings...

...The lithograph, The Dance in the Madhouse, the black and white rendering of a Stag at Sharkey's, are violent transcriptions of violent facts, magnificently rendered, but Amour, Punchinello in the House of Death, The Christ of the Wheel, are more than masterpieces of drawing...

...In the latter picture the old-fashioned American gentlewoman has her most brilliant expositionmas well as her grand-daughter...

...Detail gives place to broad sweep and fullness of line, its spirit conveyed less by particularities than by what is generous and general in the mood of locality...

...France has her Monet, her C~zanne, her Redon Dthat painter of spiritual portents behind the "accidents" of matter--but in the United States the inter- pretation of the new order is still in the experimental stage, with such brilliant exceptions, among others, as Bellows, Albert Ryder and .Arthur Davies...

...In The Sand-Team, the rounded heavy hills, broadly placed in light and shadow, convey the essense of the subject, as perfectly as the powerful team of horses in the foreground...

...More than one-half of the retiring senators will fail to be re~lected...

...But he can move from the starkest realism to such unearthly beauty as suffuses The Picnic with its strange pale clouds over the broad, horizontal masses of the dark blue mountains, rising above the two enchanting little hills, reflected, solid for solid, in the deep water...

...Here, expressed through shadowy images and half-lights and extraordinary, thrilling color is the very mood of a picnic, its relaxation, its brief, dreamy joy...

...To pass from this picture to the prize-ring paint- ings, the Dempsey-Firpo Fight, Sharkey's, Both Mem- bers of This Club, Ringside Seats, is to realize the sweep of the painter's sympathies, the broadness of his human outlook, as well as his amazing technique in the pres- entation of crowds around the saw-dust of the prize~ ring--his mastery not only of human figures in spir- ited, excited attitudes, but of those problems of high light and deep shadow which would be the despair of a lesser artist...

...The counting of votes in this large constituency under proportionate representation is a tedious busi- ness, and the complete results are not yet in...

...T. in Wine Silk, are unforgettable presentations of per- sonality, entirely free from the sugar-and-cream ele-ments of the fashionable portrait painterEwhich, by the way, Bellows never was...

...No one since Franz Hals has de- picted middle and old age with the vigor, tender humor and understanding of character that Bellows brings to the paintings of his Aunt Fanny, of his Por- trait of My Mother, and of the two aged women in Eleanor, Jean and Anna...

...for generations of chil- dren have played under its old trees...

...The tempo of Rain on the River, Warships on the Hudson, and that en-chanting landscape Easter Snow, is lively and vigorous...

...Deeply reverent and sur-charged with dramatic feeling, it is also filled with such a poignant sense of sinning and suffering human- ity, drawn to the suffering God, that the amazed and terrified forms seem to embody the turbulent history of the world, forever circling about the figure of Christ on the Cross...

...He has employed them to heighten the tragedy of Edith Cavell, and to deepen the wild charm of the marine Evening Swells...

...William Oxley Thompson, Emma in Purple Dress, Portrait of Katherine Rosen, Mrs...

...The emphasis, the intensity, is, by a paradox, diffused through all these bodies in attitudes of activity or rela~:ation...

...Bellows fully comprehended the decorative value of the human form, and in Riverfront, the swarming figures of the bathers are all, in a sense, the salients of the pictureu the black wharf, the tug, the sail-boat being merely background to joyous humanity, factors of support or contrast...

...Even a rose must die...

...6r4 T H E C O M M O N W E A L October 28, I925 citizenship...

...Summer is past...

...To Bellows art was far less a gallery achievement than a full-blooded embodi- ment of life itself...

...His art constantly elucidates the human drama, whether in that stark and colorful transcript of the slums, The Cliff Dwellers, or in the haunted painting of Gramercy Park, in which Bellows has established the perfect balance of the forces focus- sed in that little refuge...

...liant years of his life his directness, his originality, his indifference to popularity, kept him sacredly apart in his own extraordinary cosmos...

...But in the adult portraits, the world is narrowed to the sitter, and, all that is nugatory, all that does not elucidate the personality of the subject, is eliminated...

...And I who love you, shall as quietly go Out of your heart forever, whether we cry "Not yet !" and whether we will it or no...

...How else, then, shall another spring come by Or other blooms attain the sun, and blow...

...Here the artist passes into a world of symbolism and proves his under- standing of spiritual realities...

...Labor, working through the trade-unions and with excellent candidates, is also coming successfully through the elections...

...Directing his penetrating and original spirit into new fields of aesthetic expression, he left to less gifted artists the static and irrevocable...

...Bellows's employment of the nude is a significant element in his art...

...The liquor interest, stricken with apprehension at the impending legislation which will probably reduce the number of public houses in the Free State by one-half, strained every effort in ensuring the return of two representatives...

...The Golden Tic'seed Now does the golden tickseed bloom its last...

...Religious painting in America has been so neglected, with such rare exceptions as the distinguished and beautiful work of Augustus Tack, that Bellows's Crucifixionuthe climax of his art--is a matter for gratitude and hope to those who would gladly see a flowering of religious art, and an awaken- ing devotion to the supreme themes of the Christian faith in the studios of painters throughout the country...

...Doctors have done better than lawyers, and the man with the country pull has defeated his town rival...

...His landscapes and interiors, swarming with figures, are syntheses of human drama, surcharged with vital- ity, and radiating a robust sense of the joys and vigors October 28, I925 THE COMMONWEAL 6xS of life very welcome in American art, too long under the sway of the pretty and the pictorialDthe mere story-telling element in painting...

...The mystical quality in Bellows's genius is shown in what is perhaps his greatest work, and one of his last--The Crucifixion...

...He is essentially modern in his employment of color and in his preoccupation with the effects of light on form and volume...

...Summer is past...

...Ryder thus understood it in his Lancelot and Elaine, and Davies in many of his magical works...

...Beyond these achievements, Emma and Her Children, Dr...

...and it is the painter's subtle sense of the wide, vague, enchanted world of childhood that has transferred this imaginative world from the three small figures to the half-mystical landscape...

...Through the short, bril...

...While singularly free from the weight of European influence, Bellows, by the virtue of his genius, established a family kinship with masters as widely separated as Giorgione and Renoir, and he has linked himself in his astonishing litho- graphs and drawings with creators as diverse as Wil- liam Blake and Daumier...

...At the moment, a man distinguished by a long and creditable record of service in local administration heads the poll, and this class of candidate with an apprenticeship record upon the county councils is re-ceiving full recognition...

...The child in the white dress in the foreground is the pivotal point of the composi- tion, illustrating the feature of the little park which is most vivid in the memory...

...and though one may regret the absence of strands of finer quality, one is assured of a' quite respectable competence...

...But the functions of the Seanad are purely revisory, wherein the homespun virtues may be appropriately exercised...

...For Bellows is also a most sympathetic painter of children, evoking the winsomeness of childhood with a comprehension of the sources of its charm that Rey- nolds might have envied...

...as much by the preoccupied figures under the trees, as by the strange, affecting play of light *and shade...

...Here is more than brilliant technique, and skilful depic- tion of fabric, of flesh...

...In Jean, Anne and Joseph, the glamor of fairy-tales and of nursery days is dif- fused over the very hills...

...The August days are done...

...But the returns are sufficiently advanced to foresee the result...

...GUSTAV DAVIDSON...

...Bellows is at once a dramatist and a dreamer, and in his range of sympathies touches extreme poles of artistic expression...

...At the Metropolitan Museum are gathered the fruits of a genius, which, essentially American, and nurtured in this soil, manifested itself in independence of outlook, in vigorous presentation of virile themes and in color-rapturesmveritable ecstasies of colorE which seem like translations of our own riotous springs and highly painted autumns...

...As a whole, the farmers' candidates had done exceptionally well, including spe- cial representations of the cattle and horse breeding interests...

...His works on exhibition may be divided broadly into three classes~his lithographs and drawings~ which illustrate on what a firm foundation of draughts- manship his polychrome achievements were built--his landscapes and interiors with figures, and his amazing portraits which establish his title as a master in a division of art where the masters are few and the technicians many...

...The unclothed human form long neglected by American painters in its adaptability to design~is again understood, to some degree at least, as the old masters understood it~the nude not so much as a depiction of flesh as a revelation of spirit, of which the Botticelli Venus is a supreme example...

...They will be replaced for the most part by men of not less practical ability, experienced in the conduct of local administration and perhaps of some-what narrow outlook...

...Now do the glad petunias, row on row, Falter and fail, while to the ground they cast Memorial petals--richly dying so...

...The sweet alyssum, in their overthrow, Breathe forth a final sweetness ere the blast Of Autumn sounds and ere the firstling snow...

...more than full and ringing color...

...Bellows is essentially of the modern spirit in the art-world, long since mani- festing itself in the studios of Paris, but regarded somewhat with suspicion in this country, timid and distrustful of pioneer work both in art and letters, under the blighting puritan tradition, still active among us...

...This is not to say that anything partaking of corrupt influence was at work or that a sound rec-ord of good local administration was not rewarded, but that in a democracy uninspired by any vivid appeal or present peril, voters will vote for "the neighbor's child" or the representative of their own business interests...