On Art
BLOCH, BRADLEY W.
On Art THE USE AND ABUSE OF REALISM BY BRADLEY W BLOCH George Bellows, who died in 1925 at age 42, has occupied a secure niche in American art history as " the fellow who did the boxing...
...Bellows' sympathies were with the latter group...
...posed certain problems...
...A third man in the lower-right comer holds his head in his hands (whether out of repentance or despair we cannot tell), and a little girl alongside him seems entertained by the spectacle as well as proud of herself for sitting so quietly...
...What is most notable about this print —andahallmark of Bellows' best work —is that the people do not sink into caricature...
...Several of Bellows' older colleagues in this group, like his former teacher Robert Henri and John Sloan, convinced critics and even some of the public that urban street scenes were as worthy of a painter's attention as the epic historical narratives and sentimental domestic scenes that were then fashionable...
...In The Jury (1917) he takes on the juried art exhibit, a perennial source of complaint among artists...
...He was a much more beneficial influence in Bellows' Dance in a Madhouse (1917...
...The face in one is defined solely by lines of different weights, while in another subtle shading imparts a sculptural density...
...In 1917, when debate raged in intellectual circles over whether the U.S...
...This success, however, did not alter the fact that Realist subjects tend to work better as drawings than paintings...
...The nature of the relationship between art and politics was, in Bellows' day as now, ahotly contested issue...
...Yet his magazine illustration of the heavily attended event, made into a lithograph in 1923, is characteristically complex...
...They showed the Huns raping and brutalizing innocent civilians who were often posed like classical statues...
...He saw not a seething, faceless mass, but a dynamic assortment of individual human beings...
...He has moved away from the pulpit, his right foot planted firmly behind him on a makeshift desk that has been set up for the journalists, his left foot stretched onto another desk in front...
...The technique of printing from stone isso complicated that the artist virtually has to form a partnership with a professional printer...
...Knowing the artist before seeing the print, one might expect it to be a disclosure of the woman's personality...
...But the picture's central conflict is expressed by the attitude of two welldressed women walking in the foreground of the immigrant neighborhood...
...The boy is barefoot because boys ran around barefoot, not because he is a symbol of his class...
...He was a gritty Realist and junior member of the cluster of artists disparagingly referred to as the Ashcan School, because of their often blunt portrayals of ordinary life...
...Although Bellows effectively dramatizes the preacher's hellfire passion, it is the diverse reactions of the people gathered in the cavernous hall that ultimately underscore Sunday's diabolical intensity and at the same time render him more human...
...Thatfalse image is very quickly dispelled by a visit to the National Academy of Design in New York City, where 75 of the artist's lithographs are on display through October 29...
...The opponents of this view maintained that it was sufficient for artists to capture what they saw, good and bad, on the streets of the city, and that the cause of social justice would triumph without their professional assistance...
...As a group of forlorn-looking men wait on line to present their canvases for judgment, the jurors regard the work before them with thinly veiled condescension...
...This set of principles, formulated by Bellows' contemporary Jay Hambidge, established an elaborate composition system based on Euclidean geometry...
...Bellows was fascinated by the crowd...
...On Art THE USE AND ABUSE OF REALISM BY BRADLEY W BLOCH George Bellows, who died in 1925 at age 42, has occupied a secure niche in American art history as " the fellow who did the boxing pictures...
...Bellows loathed the charismatic evangelist, calling him "the worst thing that ever happened to America...
...he was able to develop a close working relationship with two of the foremost lithographers of his day, George Miller and Bolton Brown...
...Goya was no exception...
...Much of his lithography focused on large public gatherings—eating and drinking places, church revivals and, of course, boxing matches...
...Playing the role for real some years later, he tried in vain to open up the selection process to a wider variety of styles...
...The formal center of each picture—be it a pugilist or a preacher—often was a pretext for exploring the surrounding assembly...
...Frequently Bellows' tone was less satirical and more directly confrontational...
...Such associations were not easy to come by...
...Early in his career Bellows actually became established as an oil painter...
...On one side stood those who felt the artwork in the Masses should be in the service of the Socialist cause—full of top-hatted businessmen oppressing emaciated workers...
...The topics he addressed—social stratification, the individual in the crowd, the foibles of the art world—still speak to us today...
...On the occasions when he faltered, it was usually because he started drawing before he finished thinking...
...Lithography, in which prints are pulled from a grease drawing made on limestone, is rich with the same qualities...
...Each seems as if it were done by a different hand...
...That would come soon enough, with the modernism that was already making inroads on these shores...
...It is not surprising, therefore, given Bellows' ability as a draftsman, that his reputation has been more strongly confirmed by his lithographs than his canvases...
...The years immediately before and after World War I marked the rise of the Common Man, and like his contemporary, the writer John Dos Passos, Bellows was a chronicler of this new democratic phenomenon...
...The result is captivating even in its harshness...
...The Street has areportorial feel to it and does not degenerate into the romantic slumming and political hectoring that is often the fate of a Realist style...
...Understandably, most of these works were left out of the exhibition...
...An increased attention to detail is also evident in other works, like Nude Study, Classic on a Couch (1923-24...
...During the last two years of its short life—it eventually ran out of money and in 1925 became an organ of the Communist Party as the New Masses —the journal was in the grip of the sort of fierce internal battle that so often occurs at little magazines...
...The lithographs of his daughters executed between 1921-24 are a good example...
...You have got to create the atmosphere of an exhibition in which great artists are having a great time," he told the editors, cautioning them to go easy on the propaganda...
...Unfortunately, Bellows did not always follow his own advice...
...In a classically balanced pose, Sunday towers over a platform packed with reporters and thrusts out his arm to point an accusing finger at the audience below...
...The texture of pencil and ink, and the spectrum of shadings and contrasts the medium can produce, evoke an immediacy oil cannot match...
...Through it all, the members of the press seated underneath Sunday's straddling figure jadedly go about their job—they have heard him many times before...
...ButRealism, after all, was not a cerebral style...
...His specific fame is understandable, since no one has equaled his depictions of life in the ring, but it suggests he was a sort of Leroy Neiman of the 1920s...
...It is difficult for an artist to keep melodrama and heavy symbolism at bay when the subject is his countrymen dying on the battlefield...
...Some of Bellows' lithographs offer more explicit social or cultural commentary...
...In contrast to Europe, where a tradition of fine printmaking had been slowly cultivated, American lithography was almost entirely a commercial enterprise, concerned with maps, advertisements and middlebrow kitsch of the Currier and Ives variety...
...He was quite capable of being obvious and trite and, what is more disturbing, opportunistic as well...
...One woman, holdingaparasol, surveys the situation with the cautious curiosity of someone in an alien land...
...Along with Stuart Davis, Sloan, and other prominent artists, he was a contributor to the influential Socialist periodical the Masses...
...should have entered the War, he did a clichéd antiwar drawing for the Masses that pictured Christ garbed in prison stripes...
...Another juror, pensively smoking a cigar, is Bellows himself, and his own painting is next in line...
...But Bellows was extremely fortunate...
...His Disasters of War etchings, vividly documenting the Peninsular War with France, pale beside his wickedly penetrating Caprichos...
...Many people have disagreed, but Bellows' last printer, Bolton Brown, felt that these final efforts, notthemore popular boxing pictures, were the artist's best work...
...Instead, she is merely a formal element, and the work's finest attribute is the delectable way Bellows balances the figure with the drapery of the couch...
...A great deal has been made of his debt to the Spaniard, but in this case Goya's example did not serve him well...
...Jane Myers and Linda Ayres, coauthors of the thoroughly annotated catalogue, note that when Bellows was asked to continue the War series, he agreed by replying "I'll Goya...
...Clothed in ostentatious bohemian attire, the juror closest to us chats indifferently with a colleague, his feet up on a chair...
...In the beginning of the 1900s, though, making serious lithographs in the U.S...
...The 1917 print TheStreet reproduces a Lower East Side thoroughfare with its familiar hanging laundry and elevated subway tracks...
...Like Goya in the Caprichos, Bellows employs a delicate, almost Baroque line to express the modern version of the demonic and the possessed...
...Bellows was a keen and avid observer of American life, and he left behind a record of his time...
...The scene is a weekly dance at a mental hospital whose superintendent was a friendof the artist...
...A babushka is scolding a boy for having beaten up another youngster who stands crying off to the side...
...In the last years of Bellows' life the severity of his Realist's eye softened a bit, partly because of his interest in an esthetic theory called "dynamic symmetry...
...In 1915 Metropolitan Magazine sent Bellows and John Reed to Philadelphia, where Reed was to write a story on Billy Sunday's revival meetings...
...Thenextyear, withmost Americans supporting President Wilson's decision to send troops to Europe, he produced a propagandistic series of lithographs that would have made the most strident jingoist blush...
...The adoption of overarching theories can spell doom for an artist, but for Bellows it provided an impetus to experiment with new drawing styles...
...her companion averts her eyes in haughty disgust...
...One prosperous-looking man glows in beatific contentment, while the uniformed military officer next to him appears skeptical and slightly confused...
Vol. 72 • October 1989 • No. 15
