George Bellows 1882 - 1925

M. Knoedler & Co., New York
Adolph Lewisohn, New York
Estate of Mr. A.M. Dick (sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, May 2, 1956, lot 90, illustrated)
M.V. Horgan (acquired at the above sale)
Mr. C. Ruxton Love, Jr., New York, 1966
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1975
Meredith Long & Co., Houston, Texas
Private Southwestern Collection (sold: Sotheby's, New York, December 1, 1994, lot 38, illustrated in color)
Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

Columbus, Ohio, The Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Paintings by George Bellows, March-April 1957, no. 34
New York, Gallery of Modern Art, George Bellows, Paintings, Drawings and Lithographs, March-May 1966, no. 39
New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, George Bellows 1882-1922, 1971, no. 9, illustrated
New York, City Hall, Ash Can School Exhibition, April-July 1975
Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, The Private Eye, Selected Works from Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June-August 1989
Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art; Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art; Fort Worth, Texas, The Amon Carter Museum, The Paintings of George Bellows, February 1992-May 1993, pp. 53, 56, 57, 160, illustrated in color p. 57, fig. 54

We are grateful to Michael Quick for preparing the following essay. Mr. Quick is the former Curator of American art and department head at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  His most recent publication is George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2007).

The extremely talented George Bellows (1882-1925) achieved early success as an Ashcan School artist, rapidly rising to the status of one of the leading American painters of his generation.  Following his untimely death, Bellows entered the canon of the foremost  American artists of the past century.  He is especially remembered for paintings like Dock Builders, 1916, in which he captured the life of the common man in iconic images.

Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, Bellows in the fall of 1904 enrolled in William Merritt Chase's New York School of Art, where he began to study under Robert Henri (1865-1929), who was to become a life-long friend and a potent influence upon his entire career.  Besides encouraging Bellows's remarkable technical ability, Henri also shaped Bellows's early style and his choice of subject matter.   Bellows did not exhibit, with the group of artists assembled around Henri, in the landmark exhibition of The Eight at Macbeth Galleries in 1908, but he was closely allied with them at that time, by friendship and close working relationships. In that early period he shared with the Ashcan School artists the themes of his paintings of everyday life in the poorer sections of New York, as well as in his frank portrayals of urban reality.  In his Ashcan School period Bellows painted such classic American images as his powerful boxing scene,  Stag at Sharkey's, 1909 (Cleveland Museum of Art) and his sympathetic portrayal of the poor on the Lower East Side of New York, Cliff Dwellers, 1913 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).  His figure subjects and almost all of his outdoor scenes of this period were about life in New York City.

It was on the coast of Maine that Bellows discovered the joy of landscape and especially seascape painting.  During the summer of 1911 he accompanied Robert Henri to the island of Monhegan, off the coast of Maine.  In 1913 he returned to the island, this time with other young artists.  He was on the island again in 1914.  During the war years, his family did not want to sail to the island of Monhegan, because they feared German submarines, after the torpedoing of the Lusitania in May 1915. Bellows therefore summered in Ogunquit, Maine, with its artists' colony, during the summer of 1915, and then in Camden, Maine, during the summer of 1916. His repeated summer visits to Maine generally were highly productive periods, of mostly landscape painting.  Happy with the work his Maine environment had inspired, he was reluctant to leave in the early fall, remaining on Monhegan until the water was shut off for the winter. During these summers his landscape style steadily developed.  It was especially during his summers on Monhegan in 1913 and in Camden in 1916, that his landscape style came alive, with considerably stronger colors and compositions.

Bellows came to Camden that summer of 1916 after something of a hiatus from painting urban figure subjects. In Camden he began a new approach in Dock Builders, the first of his ship building paintings, a pivotal painting in which he took up the subject of the American worker in the countryside, the identifiably American and traditional subject matter that would become so important to his paintings of the 1920s.  It was followed, later that summer, by Builders of Ships (The Rope).  Bellows's ship building paintings were a response to the brief revival of wooden ship building at Camden during World War I.  They celebrate the traditional crafts and grand group efforts that still could raise great American ships as in the days of old.

Attention naturally has been focused on the characteristically American subject matter of these paintings of working men along the Maine coast.  The men appear almost heroic in their muscular movement, their actions seemingly grander, because of the simplicity and honesty of the portrayal.  Bellows had demonstrated many times before his comfortable feeling for the working life of men and their daily struggle.

Yet, a closer look at Dock Builders reveals another side of Bellows, as an early modernist reflecting the strongest current influence then coming from Europe:  the art of Cézanne.¹  One sees this in the unified and forceful composition, organized around projecting volumes, but especially in the color. Critically, the way that Bellows used color in Dock Builders to shape forms through the relationship of distinct color areas, especially in the large rocks at the left, shows Bellows's awareness of Cézanne.  It also demonstrates Bellows's understanding and practice of Cézanne's method of color relationships.  Specifically, he used the Post-Impressionist method of modeling forms from blue in the shadowed, receding areas, purple or orange in the partially swelling areas, and yellow in the projecting areas.  He notably tried to keep those colored patches distinct, acknowledging his attempt to apply the method of Cézanne.  This approach to the modeling of forms is also present to some extent in the right foreground rocks, the distant hills, and the figures, although it is not as apparent.

During the period 1905-1920 Cézanne was recognized by all the American early modernists as the source of modern art.  Although they went off in different directions, all agreed in their veneration of Cézanne.  At some point all of them tried to learn Cézanne's approach to color relationships, and tried to put it to work in their own paintings.  In that sense, Bellows was right in step with the latest in American modernism.

Bellows's awareness of modern European art and of early modernism in New York has not been much studied, in part because written evidence is not readily at hand.  Well known and well documented, in contrast, are his attempts to use compositional systems and color systems to arrive at a new way of painting in concert with Robert Henri, John Sloan, and the color theorists Hardesty Maratta and Denman Ross.²  The successive systems that they arrived at, it must be noted, were largely independent of modern art, although they reflected some similar current attitudes.  Thus it has been thought that Bellows's experiments with color were confined to the approaches and systems of these Ashcan School friends.  I would like to suggest that the gregarious Bellows had other young friends, including some early modernists, and that he may have picked up some ideas from them, as well.

Tracing Bellows's growing awareness of Cézanne must remain in the realm of conjecture.  It may have begun early in 1913, with the Armory Show, which Bellows had a hand in organizing.  That exhibition of modern art included the first representative group of Cézanne works to appear in the country, thirteen oils, one watercolor, and one print.  It may be that he spotted the relatively quiet Cézanne paintings in that quite large exhibition of much more assertive works.  The purchase of a Cézanne landscape from the exhibition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art may also have drawn some attention to Cézanne's paintings.  However, there is no way to know whether Bellows looked closely at the Cézanne paintings in the Armory Show.

More likely, Bellows's first encounter with Cézanne was indirect, occurring in 1913 on the island of Monhegan, off the coast of Maine.  Also painting on the island that summer were the early modernists Andrew Dasburg (1887-1979) and Leon Kroll (1884-1974), at that time also a modernist.  Both of them had learned to venerate Cézanne during their years in Paris.  Kroll had been mesmerized when he first saw a group of Cézanne paintings in a dealer's window in 1909, and his admiration for the French artist grew during his later visits to Paris in 1910, 1911, and 1914.  Dasburg's introduction to Cézanne was through the Cézanne devotee Morgan Russell, with whom Dasburg shared a house in Woodstock, New York during the summer of 1907.  Russell's letters to Dasburg, urging him to come to Paris to see the great modern art, persuaded Dasburg to go to Paris in April 1909.  Through Russell he was introduced to the active and influential avant-garde salon of the collectors of modern painting, Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo Stein. There he had the opportunity of seeing numerous Cézanne paintings in the presence of Leo Stein, a great admirer and advocate for Cézanne, in discussions and in print.  In 1910 Russell and Dasburg borrowed a small Cézanne still life from Leo Stein in order to make copies.  Dasburg returned to New York that August as an evangelist for Cézanne and for modern approaches to painting.

Bellows began the summer of 1913 painting Monhegan coastal views using the muted palette of  colors that he had employed during his summer there with Robert Henri in 1911.  But before long his use of color changed dramatically.  There is no other explanation for such a profound change in Bellows's range of colors, other than the influence of the early modernists painting there on the island.  Dasburg was painting Monhegan with detached patches of strong color, creating the forms through the relationship of the colors, in the manner of Cézanne.  As described in the case of Dock Builders, Dasburg was modeling from blue through purple, orange and red toward yellow, to build forms and create volumes.  He also used the distinct side-by-side brushstrokes that he had seen in the paintings of Cézanne.  (It should be said, however, that Dasburg's strong color owes much to the example of his friend, the Synchromist Morgan Russell, while the large planes also reflect Dasburg's acquaintance with Cubism.)  The muted colors of the landscapes Bellows had painted when he first arrived on the island that summer must have looked like dishwater next to Dasburg's paintings.  Of course Bellows had to modify his style to paint with similarly strong colors.  While still painting in a conventional, if brilliant manner, Bellows began to paint with the more intense color that makes the landscapes of that summer so sunny and attractive.³

Already that summer Bellows made his first efforts to also apply the Cézanne method of modeling forms through the relationship of colors.  For instance, in Shaghead, 1913 (Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences, Savannah) Bellows described the gray rocks there in terms of an opposition of blue for turned or receding areas and yellow for  projecting forms, with some purple and orange in transitions.  By the summer of 1914, when he painted Summer Surf, Bellows clearly was modeling with color, the gray rocks now blue in their shadows and deeper parts and orange in the projecting volumes, with some transitional pink.  It is significant that the local, actual color of the rocks was totally subordinated to the modernist modeling through color relationships.  Bellows wrote of his use of color in a letter to Prof. Joseph Taylor on June 16, 1915, "I have been painting with pure color, arriving at a richer statement with more reserve than before.  This sounds paradoxical.  But great, dignified masses can just as well or better often be made with powerful colors as with grays." (Bellows Papers, Amherst College Library)

In the early part of 1916 Bellows then would have had the opportunity to study Cézanne in some depth.  The exhibition at the Montross Gallery that opened that year contained  a representative group of thirty watercolors and seven oil paintings.  It received extensive, admiring press attention.  There also was a small Cézanne show at the Modern Gallery, and Knoedler's had two paintings.  If Bellows indeed had been primed to appreciate Cézanne, those exhibitions must have elicited his increased interest.  With an artist's eye, he also would have been able to see, in many examples, exactly how Cézanne used color relationships to create form.  The effects of these experiences were not immediately apparent in Bellows's works, primarily because he painted relatively little during the first half of 1916, while he was engaged in the virtually one-man resurrection of lithography as an artists' medium, creating some of his greatest prints.

When Bellows reached Camden, Maine in June, 1916, to begin his summer's work, he was ready to put to work what he had learned.  He had persuaded his close friend Leon Kroll to join him and move into a shed adjacent to the house where the Bellows family was staying.  Kroll, who painted the Cézanne-like Landscape--Two Rivers (The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection) in 1917, almost certainly encouraged Bellows to explore the modernist impulses that may have arisen from Bellows's study of Cézanne that winter.  Bellows's third painting that summer was Dock Builders, which he painted with the following colors:  blue (at the intensities 9,5,3,1), orange-yellow (at the low intensity of 1), and red-purple and red-orange (both in the middle intensity of 5), according to his record book.  Clearly yellow also was used. (The green in the logs he would have made by blending blue paint into yellow on the canvas.)

Dock Builders is the clearest expression of Bellows's adoption of the methods of Cézanne and the early American modernists, in terms of creating shapes through the relationship of distinct patches of colors.  Yet he had so mastered the modernist method, and his volumes were so convincing, that few have noticed that aspect of the painting.  This painting, charged with intense color, appears, to most, to be simply a record of a crew's labor on the coast of Maine.  The modernist methods of Cézanne could produce a joyous scene of strong forms, daylight, and atmosphere, when used by an artist with the towering talent of Bellows.

Because Bellows so clearly declared his Cézanne-like approach in Dock Builders, it is possible to recognize the method in other paintings of 1916 and 1917 that are drenched in strong color.  After a period beginning in 1918, when he switched to an Old Master technique of glazed color, Bellows in the 1920s resumed a modification of his approach of 1916, in paintings that reflect his new understanding of how color works.

¹ For a comprehensive discussion of the introduction of the works of Cézanne into the United States, as well as of the foundational role of Cézanne in shaping American early modernism, see the exhibition catalogue, Cézanne and American Modernism (Montclair Art Museum and The Baltimore Museum of Art, 2009).

² For a full discussion of Bellows's color and compositional theories within his Ashcan School circle, see the author's essay "Technique and Theory:  The Evolution of George Bellows's Painting Style," in the exhibition catalogue The Paintings of George Bellows (Amon Carter Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992).  For a related discussion of Robert Henri's use of the same color systems, see the author's essay, "Robert Henri: Theory and Practice," in the exhibition catalogue My People: The Portraits of Robert Henri (Orlando Museum of Art, 1994).

³ In 1915, Bellows, Henri, Sloan, Charles F. Winter, Randall Davey, and Hardesty Maratta met to agree upon a new system of color based primarily on the intensity (strength, saturation) of color.  All of them had shifted toward using more intense color by that point.  It should be said that a factor in that general shift of palette no doubt was the stronger color of the early modernists influenced by Matisse and the Fauves.