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.

By ROBERTA SMITH

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.”

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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.