Art Review
Restless in Style and Subject
‘George Bellows,’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Librado Romero/The New York Times
“New York” (1911) is part of
the “George Bellows” multigallery retrospective at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, which features portraits, landscapes and city life by
Bellows, who died at 42.
Published: November 15, 2012
Just after the American painter George Bellows died of a ruptured
appendix at the age of 42, in 1925, the writer Sherwood Anderson offered
a poignant assessment. Anderson wrote that Bellows’s last paintings
“keep telling you things. They are telling you that Mr. George Bellows
died too young. They are telling you that he was after something, that
he was always after it.”
Whatever Bellows was after, he pursued it restlessly, not just in his
final canvases but through most of his busy and multifaceted, if
truncated, career, and only rarely did he catch up with it. This is the
ultimate message of “George Bellows,” an unnecessarily disappointing
retrospective that has come to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art from the
National Gallery
in Washington. Organized by Charles Brock, an associate curator there,
it contains some 70 oils and 30 works on paper. Still, there is a good
chance you will emerge from it starving for truly alive art. I sure did.
At least as seen at the Met, Bellows was constantly changing his subject
matter and adjusting his often buttery handling of paint, but too many
of the canvases fall short of being convincing. His best efforts here
are limited mostly to the early years of the 20th century, when, in a
burst of promise shortly after arriving in New York, Bellows made
paintings of street urchins, boxers, construction sites and urban
riverscapes that are found in the exhibition’s first four galleries. Too
many works in the remaining six are stilted period pieces.
The Bellows conjured in the Met show comes across as a talented and
ambitious yet complacent artist, earnest and hard-working but often
remote, an artist who frequently failed to work from that crucial point
where criticality and desperation forge ambition and skill into
something indelibly personal and expandable. He once said, “A work of
art can be any imaginable thing, and this is the beginning of modern
painting.” And yet his own art rarely questions the accepted conventions
of his time.
But whether this exhibition does Bellows’s achievement justice is a good
question, and easier to answer than usual: the catalogue raisonné of
Bellows’s paintings is available
online. (It was assembled by Glenn C. Peck, who contributes an essay to the catalog.)
Perusing the nearly 700 paintings reproduced on the site reveals that
the show ignores all but four of the hundreds of increasingly visionary
plein air oil panels of rocky coasts, landscapes and ramshackle farms
that Bellows painted from 1911 on, first in Maine and then in Woodstock,
N.Y. (A wall text in the final gallery dismissively refers to the small
Woodstock landscapes as “bucolic,” an underestimation.) There are also
numerous larger works that might have improved the show, among them the
National Design Museum’s great Maine canvas, “Three Rollers” (1911).
Bellows may have enjoyed more success than was good for him. Born in
Columbus, Ohio, in 1882, he was the only child of a comfortably well-off
builder; he grew up excelling at sports and art and wanted to be an
illustrator. He played baseball and basketball at Ohio State University
and was encouraged to pursue art. By 1904 he was in New York, where he
played semipro baseball during his first two summers and studied with
the charismatic artist Robert Henri, who diverted him from illustration
toward painting.
Henri exhorted his students to paint urban life at its grittiest — which
would later lead them to be known as the Ashcan School — and to study
Manet, Daumier, Velázquez and Goya and other European masters of
suggestive darkness. “On the East Side,” a deeply shadowed early drawing
that Bellows made around 1906, evinces a touching reverence for
Rembrandt, though he would also look to Renoir, Degas and Whistler.
Bellows was exhibiting his work by 1907, receiving prizes and positive
reviews. It didn’t hurt that as a former athlete and eventual family man
who liked to paint his wife and daughters, he projected a virile
persona, nonneurotic and nonbohemian. By 1911 he was represented in the
Met’s collection; by 1913 he was a full member of the National Academy
of Design, the youngest ever admitted. In the thick of New York’s
progressive art circles, he helped install Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a
Staircase” in the Armory Show — in which he was also represented — but
he disdained the exhibition’s most radical import, Cubism.
Bellows’s gifts for illustration and handling paint enabled him to
follow Henri’s advice with rare verve, as evidenced by paintings like
the 1906 “Kids,” whose lush surface and precarious composition captures
the incipient chaos of children’s sidewalk games with an immediacy that
presages the
photographs of Helen Levitt.
In the 1907 “42 Kids,” with its swarm of boys skinny-dipping in the East
River, his painterly and caricatural ease collude so effectively that
the figures read as cartoons. This hints at a problem that runs
throughout his work: his figures often feel more like glosses, types or
character actors playing parts than like real people. Exceptions can be
found in early portraits like “Paddy Flannigan” (1908), where a
cross-eyed, bucktoothed newsboy strikes a defiant, bare-chested pose,
fully present.
At times Bellows seemed to think that modernity was achieved by scaling
up the oil study until the physicality of paint becomes an especially
active part of the story. In his best-known painting, the 1909 “Stag at
Sharkey’s,” the colliding bodies of the two fighters are defined by
sinuous strokes of paint that make their flesh seem almost to meld at
impact. It looks back to the French and Spanish masters, while pointing
in its raw violence toward Futurism and even Action Painting. The work
personifies an artist who, as Carol Troyen, curator emerita of American
paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, writes in the catalog,
shrewdly walked the line between tradition and innovation and was seen
in his time as an unlikely combination of academician and independent.
More genuinely forward-looking are three dark, enigmatic paintings of
the excavation for Penn Station from 1907-9 that, as Ms. Troyen
suggests, show modern progress as a violation of nature, a giant void in
the earth, and give this “wound” a reality and lasting power that no
photograph could match. In these works paint is laid on in broad, rough
slabs, becoming earth and also incipient abstraction. Loosely
descriptive details intimate machines, bonfires, workers and surrounding
buildings, all but dwarfed by the primordial setting. Across the way,
“Rain on the River” of 1908, a sweeping view of Riverside Park, busy
railroad tracks and the Hudson rendered in misty, Whistlerian grays, has
an effortless ease.
In the fourth gallery Bellows’s painting starts to stall. He mustered a
few more strong depictions of city life, countering the void of the
excavation paintings with the 1911 “New York,” an allover cacophony of
people, vehicles and buildings on Madison Square in Manhattan at rush
hour, and coming to terms with Impressionism in paintings of the
snow-banked Hudson in winter.
But his tactile surfaces and compositions start to feel regimented and
sometimes overly full. Summery images of white-clad figures at leisure
in Central Park or watching a polo match resemble illustrations for
Vanity Fair, as do later paintings of tennis matches at Newport, R.I.,
to which he adds glowing, El Greco skies. His images of New York
dockworkers and later Maine shipbuilders start to be more ennobling and
hollow than gritty.
Hereafter the show feels rushed, superficial and slightly disorganized.
It pauses briefly for the Maine landscapes, most notably “Shore House”
and “An Island in the Sea”; scatters Bellows’s lithographs about
incoherently; and gives too much space to a group of histrionic,
propagandistic paintings of atrocities that, it was later revealed, the
Germans mostly did not commit during World War I.
A final gallery (where Anderson’s quotation appears on the wall)
includes four large stiff group portraits, where one — the deeply
strange portrait of “Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Wase” — would have sufficed.
Depicting a farm couple from Woodstock, where Bellows summered during
the last several years of his life, the Wase portrait’s dry, honest
realism is justifiably seen as a precursor to American scene painting.
On the opposite wall hang three smaller, more freely worked paintings
dominated by fantastical landscapes, the most intriguing of which is
“The White Horse,” where the El Greco sky seems quite at home among a
panoply of feathery plants and trees.
This exhibition, which has been overseen at the Met by H. Barbara
Weinberg, curator of American paintings, and Lisa M. Messinger,
associate curator of Modern and contemporary art, conveys the complexity
of Bellows’s work without sorting its strengths and weaknesses or
examining the importance of his landscape paintings — whose bright
colors can still be off-putting — during his final decade.
The preface to the catalog states that the show “highlights the ends
more than the means of Bellows’s art — its subjects and meanings more
than its methods and techniques.” This is an unfortunate approach to
take with an artist like Bellows, whose passion for paint was so overt.
In his final years it may have brought him closer than anyone yet
realizes to the something he was always after.
“George Bellows” continues through Feb. 18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum .org.
Electricity,
it's a child of the 19th-century, right? The Romans might have been
pretty clever but they never mastered putting a D cell in a torch...or
did they? There does seem to be at least some evidence of wet-cell
batteries being used on the peripheries of the Roman Empire. The famous
Baghdad Battery is more closely related to the post-Persian Parthian
Empire, but these two ancient super powers shared borders, Greek culture
and technology. Okay, so what was the Baghdad battery? Several
five-inch tall clay jars have been found around Mesopotamia (modern day
Iraq) containing hollow copper cylinders and iron rods that appear to
function as anodes and cathodes when the jar is filled with acid.
Voltages of up to 0.5-volts have been recorded from modern copies of
these vessels using vinegar, and their performance could certainly be
boosted if a stronger acid were to be used - the Romans and Parthians
would have been quite capable of manufacturing sulphuric and
hydrochloric acids which should be able to boost these wet-cells into
the region of 4 or 5 volts. All right, so they had a battery...what was
it used for? There's a couple of theories. During this period the Romans
and the Egyptians were using bio-electric fish - such as the Torpedo
Fish (the electric ray) - to numb severe pain; including gout, child
birth and migraines. One could imagine an electric ray would be hard to
find in the Mesopotamian deserts, so a 'clay ray' battery might have
been a worthy alternative. Then there's the jewellers. Just as we dress
up silver by electroplating it with gold, the ancients probably cottoned
on pretty quickly to the same game. Importantly, both pain relief and
fiddling the jewellery would have provided sufficient cash equity to
experiment with battery technology if nothing else. But is that all?
Well, maybe. These 'batteries' don't show up in Roman or Parthian
rubbish dumps like an Eveready or Duracel would these days...but, maybe,
just maybe, Thomas Edison wasn't the first guy to invent the light
bulb...more on that later.
