George Bellows Exhibit at Met Museum

This article was originally published on November 21, 2012

Anyone with a love of New York City should rush to see the George Bellows exhibit now showing at the Met Museum. Along with fellow artists in the Ashcan School, all pupils of Robert Henri, it was Bellows who best captured the teeming life of the tenements and city streets. This was as far as one could get from the mannered work, imitative of European classical painting, that had hitherto defined American art. Here instead was a muscular American realism that found its nexus in the slums of the Lower East Side and in Manhattan's fight clubs. There was no sentimentality in paintings such as Cliff Dwellers (1913) nor any explicit critique of social injustice, just a gritty depiction of everyday life as poor New Yorkers lived it. The prizefight paintings evoke perfectly the excitement of the crowd and the sweat and hard punches of the boxers themselves. Even a studio painting of an older model disregards the genre's classical motifs to display the sagging breasts and veined flabby legs of a middle aged woman. There is no glamor here, only the depiction of another poor person's work day.

The Met exhibit is extensive, even if it fails to include several signature works, and happily emphasizes Bellows' graphic work as well as oils. In fact, it is the lithographs that more fully capture the life of the city. There is also an attempt to chronicle the artist's lesser known work. But the World War I propaganda and the studied studio portraits are unconvincing and do not rise to the same level as the street work, perhaps because they were done from commercial motives alone. On the other hand, Bellows' paintings of the sea, completed in Maine, are excellent and rival the work of Winslow Homer in this genre.