Editor's note: The Portland
Museum of Art provided source material to Resource
Library for the following article or essay. If you have questions or
comments regarding the source material, please contact the Portland Museum
of Art directly through either this phone number or web address:
The Powerful Hand of George
Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library
April 10 - June 1, 2008
George Bellows (1882-1925)
has long been respected for his ability to capture the spirit and character
of American life in the early 20th century. The 
Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the
Boston Public Library, which features 57 works,
sets a new standard for recording the history and significance of the artist's
drawings. Taken from the Wiggin Collection and related lithographs at the
Boston Public Library, the works-ranging from intimate studies of the artist's
friends and family to public sporting events and social gatherings-have
not been seen together since the 1950s. The exhibition is on view April
10 through June 1, 2008 at the Portland Museum of Art. (right: George
Bellows (United States, 1882-1925), A Knock Down, 1917-1921, crayon
on paper, 15 x 19 3/16 inches, Boston Public Library.)
Best known for a relatively small number of controversial
boxing images, Bellows is equally notable for his contributions to American
landscape painting, portraiture, and especially scenes of modern American
life. His well-known paintings convey the liveliness present in many aspects
of American society, from urban scenes to the seashore. His lesser-known
drawings reveal how he captured this energy with a quick, vibrant line that
leaps off the page and brings the scenes to life. These drawings are not
only preparatory works for paintings and lithographs; they are often finished
works in themselves, intended for publication in magazines and newspapers
like Harper's Weekly and The Masses.
During his brief lifetime (he was a college drop-out at
22, member of the National Academy of Design in 1909 at 27, the country's
most accomplished lithographer at 35, and dead of appendicitis at 43), Bellows
was given major one-artist exhibitions at museums in Chicago, Detroit, Los
Angeles, Worcester, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Rochester.
Since his death in 1925, the country's most significant
collections of American painting have granted Bellows a place among their
most important artists, and celebrated his accomplishments in at least 20
major exhibitions. Bellows created an enormous body of work in his 21 years-more
than 700 paintings, almost 200 editions of lithographs and an equivalent
number of drawings.
Presentation of this exhibition in Portland will also be
enhanced by the inclusion of five monumental paintings by Bellows. These
paintings represent key moments in his career and offer an expanded view
of some of the same subjects dealt with in his works on paper. Selected
works on paper from the collection of the Portland Museum of Art will also
augment the works on view.
The exhibition was curated by Robert Conway, formerly Director
of Associated American Artists and a specialist in modern American prints
and drawings for more than 20 years. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition,
written by Conway, illustrates all 48 Wiggin drawings and describes for
the first time the ingenious combinations of graphic media Bellows used
to create them. The catalogue will be available in the Museum Store in the
spring. The Portland Museum of Art's curator for the exhibition is Jessica
Skwire Routhier.
The exhibition tour itinerary is as follows:
- The Frick Art & Historical Center in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania
(April 21-June 17, 2007);
- The Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio (July 12-September
23, 2007);
- The Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando, Florida
(October 11-December 23, 2007);
- Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (January
10-March 23, 2008);
- Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine (April 10-June
1, 2008);
- San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas (June
21-August 31, 2008);
- Boston Public Library in Boston, Massachusetts (September
22-December 1, 2008).
The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the
Boston Public Library was organized by the Trust
for Museum Exhibitions in Washington, D.C., in collaboration with the Boston
Public Library, Massachusetts.
(above: George Bellows (1882-1925), Business Men's Class,April
1913, monoprint with graphite, crayon, pen and ink, and scratchwork on the
print and the mount. 15 13/16 x 25 1/8 inches,Wiggin Collection, Boston
Public Library.)
(above: George Bellows (1882-1925), Preaching (Billy
Sunday),March 1915, crayon, pen and ink, brush and ink, wash on board,
14 13/16 x 28 5/16 inches, Wiggin Collection, Boston Public Library. )
About the Trust for Museum Exhibitions
- The Trust for Museum Exhibitions is a non-profit museum
service organization founded in 1984 by Ann Van Devanter Townsend. Respected
internationally for the unique quality of its large, richly textured traveling
exhibitions, and for distinctive and sharply focused scholarly exhibitions,
the Trust's hallmark on any fine or decorative arts project ensures intellectual
integrity and outstanding aesthetic quality in both content and execution.
-
- The Trust's Mission
-
- Without cultural diplomacy, the nations of the world
would lack a common language. With cultural exchange within and between
nations, understanding is fostered. With these founding principles as its
guide the Trust seeks to complement and expand the cultural and educational
institutions of the communities it serves by offering a rich and varied
spectrum of fine and decorative arts exhibitions for national and international
audiences. Through its comprehensive traveling exhibition services the
Trust acts as a resource for art institutions throughout the United States
and around the world.
-
- Trust Resources
-
- All of the Trust's services are managed by highly trained
and experienced exhibition professionals, supported by teams of internationally
renowned specialists. The Trust provides complete traveling exhibition
services to lending and host institutions, including conceptual planning
and development, engagement of guest curators, scheduling and logistical
planning, publications, didactic and educational materials, publicity and
marketing, conservation, security, wall-to-wall insurance, packing and
crating, domestic and international transportation and customs, registration
and installation assistance.
-
- Trust Partnerships
-
- For two decades the Trust for Museum Exhibitions has
served as a coordinator for consortium projects between museums, and has
assisted institutions in circulating their own collections. The Trust has
formed partnerships with more than 200 museums, cultural institutions,
and private collections world-wide to ensure that important objects, powerful
ideas, distinctive presentation and cost effective planning result in highly
successful and affordable exhibitions. Currently the Trust is involved
collaboratively in more than two-dozen exhibitions, either on tour or in
development in the United States and abroad.
Selected wall texts from the exhibition
-
- Opposing wall (right of entrance), to accompany photo mural (Juley
photograph from Smithsonian Photo Archives):
-
- I am always very amused with people who talk about lack of subjects.
. . . The great difficulty is that you cannot stop to sort them out enough.
Wherever you go, they are waiting for you. . . . The children at the river
edge, polo crowds, prize fights, summer evening and romance . . . the beautiful,
the ugly. . . . It seems to me that an artist must be a spectator of life;
a reverential, enthusiastic spectator, and then the great dramas of human
nature will surge through his mind.
-
-
- Intro Text (gallery interior)
-
- The Powerful Hand of George Bellows
- Drawings from the Boston Public Library
-
- George Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1882. He left his hometown
for New York City in 1904, and in the next five years, he rose from a beginning
art student to a critical and commercial success. In 21 years of professional
life, Bellows created an enormous body of work -- more than seven hundred
paintings, almost two hundred editions of lithographs, and an equivalent
number of drawings. Notorious for a few controversial boxing images painted
during his first five years in New York, he is equally notable for his
contributions to American landscape painting, portraiture, and scenes of
modern urban life.
-
- Underlying his more celebrated roles as a painter and printmaker, Bellows
maintained an active and successful career as an illustrator. His drawings
demonstrate his lively sense of humor and his seemingly effortless talent.
Bellows captured with a quickly drawn line the essence of his subjects
and then delivered it to his viewers with perception, compassion, and,
occasionally, outrage.
-
- The Powerful Hand of George Bellows presents for the first time
to a national audience the outstanding collection of drawings donated by
Albert Wiggin to the Boston Public Library. In 1941, Wiggin gave his collection
to the Library, including his near-complete group of lithographs by Bellows.
Over the next ten years, he and Arthur Heintzelman, the Library's first
Keeper of Prints, built on the strengths of his donation. In 1943, working
with Bellows's widow, Emma Bellows, and his long-time dealer, H.V. Allison,
the two completed a joint purchase/donation of the group of drawings in
this exhibition.
-
- The full range of Bellows's graphic art is represented here: quick
sketches in the field to be used later in the studio, finished compositions
intended for publication in popular magazines, commissioned illustrations
for short stories and serialized novels, preparatory drawings for lithographic
editions, and intimate portraits of friends and family. This is a rare
opportunity to see the drawings of one of this country's most accomplished
artists, as represented by one of the country's most comprehensive collections.
-
-
- Text Panels
-
- Life in the City
-
- In 1904, Bellows moved from his native Columbus, Ohio, to New York
to study art under Robert Henri. From the beginning, Bellows was acclaimed
for his ability to capture the crowds, the noise, and the characters of
the city in his paintings and drawings, many of which were reproduced in
popular magazines and newspapers. Bellows looked to his own experience
for inspiration -- including his circle of artist friends and their favorite
haunts -- but he was particularly well known for his witty and satirical
views of life in the tenements of the lower East Side. The quick and merciless
humor that was one of his greatest strengths also earned him some criticism.
One of his fellow contributors to the socialist journal The Masses
publicly criticized Bellows for humorizing the plight of the urban poor,
arguing that the subjects should be treated with more respect. This criticism
is partly responsible for the genesis of the term "Ash Can School"
that has frequently been applied to Bellows, Henri, and their colleagues
in New York.
- (illus=Artist's Costume Party, Allure of the ME Coast, p. 32)
-
- Athletics
-
- Some of Bellows's best-known works are of the sporting world. Public
boxing, prohibited in New York until 1910, was an increasing part of popular
culture at this time. The violent and semi-illicit thrill of the sport
appealed to all classes of New Yorkers, from the elite in evening dress
to the denizens of the Lower East Side. Racial differences were also played
out in the ring, with famous matches pitting opponents of different ethnicities.
Bellows adeptly used the boxing arena to explore these tensions of his
time.
-
- With these images, Bellows drew on his own athletic background. He
had been a star athlete at The Ohio State University and had contemplated
a career in professional baseball; he also frequented the seamy boxing
clubs of early 20th-century New York and was an avid billiards player.
Bellows's participation in and depiction of this world served to challenge
the prevailing stereotype of the artist as an effete academic. These works
turned artistic attention toward a rougher and more visceral experience
of athletics than the one portrayed by the previous generation of artists.
- (illus=Woodstock baseball team, Woodstock cat, p. 54)
-
- Bellows in Maine
-
- Bellows first visited Maine in 1911, traveling to Monhegan Island with
his friend and teacher with Robert Henri. Henri had been summering on Monhegan
regularly since 1903, and he brought a generation of his students there
-- including Bellows, Randall Davies, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and
Leon Kroll -- to experience Maine and establish a community of modernist
artists. Through 1916, Bellows returned to Maine annually with his wife
and daughters, finding a wealth of material for his work and participating
fully in island life.
-
- The island of Matinicus was a part of Maine that Bellows was the first
of the Henri circle to discover. He was fascinated with the sights and
sounds of the working harbor there, and around 1916 it inspired a series
of works derived from the same composition. Together they perfectly demonstrate
Bellow's facility in a variety of artistic media, and his rare ability
to give a single subject -- even a single view -- full expression with
either paint or paper.
- (illus= George Bellows on Monhegan, Allure of the ME Coast, p. 17)
-
- Illustration
-
- Bellows had made a name for himself recording his views of daily life
and real events, but in the early 1920s he made some experimental forays
into illustrating for fiction. He accepted commissions to illustrate serialized
versions of two books: The Wind Bloweth, a story of 19th-century
Ireland by Donne Byrne; and Men Like Gods, a futuristic, utopian
tale by H. G. Wells. The latter, in particular, opened up a whole new area
of expression for Bellows in depicting a purely imagined, fantastical world.
-
- These images correspond with a time in which Bellows was heavily influenced
by the art theorist Jay Hambidge, who developed a compositional system
called Dynamic Symmetry. Bellows was frequently criticized for his adherence
to Hambidge's theories, which called for a precise geometrical distribution
of pictorial elements across the picture surface. Despite this, his innate
talent for depicting human emotion and passion through gestures of the
human body is also evident in these drawings.
- (illus=GB and girls in costume, Amon Carter catalogue, p. 210)
-
- Religion
-
- In January 1915, Metropolitan Magazine hired Bellows and reporter
John Reed to cover the "Christ for Philadelphia -- Philadelphia for
Christ" rally, organized by the evangelist Billy Sunday. The resulting
article was a seamless coming together of word and image. Sunday -- who,
like Bellows, was a baseball player in his youth -- was known for dramatic
and athletic preaching style, using his entire body to convey his message
and engage his audience. Reed's words and Bellows's illustrations give
equal weight to the image of Sunday "climbing on the pulpit, sliding
from one end of the platform to the other, crouching like a runner, leaping,
crouching, every movement as graceful as a wolf's. . . . When he wrenched
himself into a contortion twenty thousand heads and shoulders involuntarily
followed."
-
- Though Reed was ambivalent about Sunday's message, Bellows was unvarnished
in his contempt for the preacher. The combination of humor and venom he
incorporated into his portrayals of Sunday -- and a handful of other images
related to organized religion, made at different points in his career --
makes them among the most powerful of his work in any media.
- (illus=Billy Sunday preaching from www.billysunday.org)
-
- Women
-
- Early in his career Bellows used the female form as the conduit for
crucial explorations in his art. The first lithographs Bellows produced
were derived from nude life studies; the classical subject helped him to
determine how to translate a composition successfully from drawing to print.
After his marriage to Emma Story in 1910 and the birth of their two daughters
in 1911 and 1915, his sensitive portraits of his family became some of
his most highly acclaimed works in all media. He also frequently portrayed
the families of his artist friends in New York and Woodstock, where he
summered from 1920 on. Bellows portrayed these women with loving elegance,
pushing the boundaries of traditional portraiture with works that examine
ideas of family, community, and even autobiography, through the depiction
of women whose lives intersected his own. Late in his career, his approach
to the female form evolved again, with nudes reappearing in his work in
a more enigmatic, seemingly symbolic, way.
- (illus=Geo, Jean, Emma & Anne @Woodstock, Woodstock cat., p. 112-also
the artist and his lithographs, p. 68)
-
- The Beach
-
- This group of images relates to a trip the Bellows family took to the
beaches at Newport, Rhode Island in 1919. Beginning around this time, Bellows
took a hiatus from his successful career as a lithographer. While in Newport
he focused on drawing from life, creating a catalogue of images he would
later use in paintings and prints. When he resumed lithography in 1921,
the resulting works were smaller than his earlier prints, more pictorially
unified, and more classically ordered, corresponding to his new interest
in compositional theories. Still clear, however, is their direct relationship
to his spontaneous drawings of years earlier, demonstrating the artist's
irrepressible humor as well as his enduring strength in documenting the
human animal at leisure.
- (illus=Henri, Bellows, Davey on Monhegan, 1911, Allure of the Maine
Coast, p. 16)
-
- The Voice of the Artist
-
- This group of large-scale images on social and political subjects make
up George Bellows's most ambitious and fully realized compositions on paper.
The War Series of 1918 documents Bellows's transition from an ardent pacifist
opposed to World War I to a supporter of the American war effort and an
ardent critic of the atrocities committed by the German army. Bellows used
as source material The Bryce Report, published in abridged form
in the New York Times in 1915. This was the report of an international
committee investigating Germany's treatment of civilians, particularly
Belgian civilians, during wartime. A number of the images, in their final
lithographic versions, were published in Vanity Fair and Everybody's
Magazine between August and December 1918.
-
- It is characteristic of Bellows's working process that his first encounter
with the material that inspired the War Series came fully three years before
the drawings and related prints were produced. His depictions of other
controversial themes -- notably The Law is Too Slow and The Dead
Line -- similarly drew upon incidents and events he had read about,
and been moved by, years before.
- (illus=GB, 1924, The artist and his lithographs, p. 128.
-
-
- Quotes
-
- [Painting] occurs simultaneous with and is inseparable from the act
of drawing.
-
- Make what propaganda there may be, subtle, interesting, full of wit
and art, or not at all.
-
- The great illustrator must be interested in the noble order of form,
the noble order of light, and the noble order of sensation.
-
- Give me a wilderness or a city -- there is much the same bigness of
life in both.
-
- Every artist is looking for news. He is a great reporter of life; keeping
his eyes open for some hitherto untold piece of reality to put on his canvas.
-
- A picture is primarily a human document, a record of the mind and heart
of the man who made it, of his limitations and his greatness.
Checklist from the exhibition
-
- Objects 1 through 57 are all from the collection of the Boston Public
Library (included in all exhibition venues)
-
- 1. Dogs, Early Morning (Hungry Dogs), February 1907
- graphite, pen and ink and crayon on paper
- 13 _x 9 7/8 inches
-
- 2. Splinter Beach, February 1912
- crayon, graphite, pen and ink wash on paper
- 16 _ x 22 _ inches
-
- 3. Business Men's Class, April 1913
- monoprint with graphite, crayon, pen and ink,
- and scratchwork on the print and the mount
- 15 13/16 x 25 1/8 inches
-
- 4. Business-Men's Class, 1916
- lithograph
- 11 5/8 x 17 1/8 inches
-
- 5. The Strugglers (Solitude), June 1913
- crayon, pen and ink, brush and inkwash on board
- 22 _ x 17 _ inches
-
- 6. Prayer Meeting (Prayer Meeting No. 1), Summer-Fall 1913
- pen and ink on paper
- 5 1/16 x 6 5/8 inches
-
- 7. Prayer Meeting, First Stone, 1916
- lithograph
- 18 x 21 _ inches
-
- 8. Night at Petitpas (Artists' Evening, Petitpas), February
1914
- crayon and graphite on paper, mounted on board
- 8 9/16 x 12 _ inches
-
- 9. Pinched (The Street), MarchApril 1914
- crayon, graphite, and pen and ink on board
- 20 x 15 3/8 inches
-
- 10. Matinicus, Fall 1916
- crayon on paper
- 6 5/8 x 9 inches
-
- 11. Billy Sunday and the Sawdust Trail (The Sawdust Trail),
March 1915
- crayon, pen and ink, brush and ink wash on board
- 26 9/16 x 19 15/16 inches
-
- 12. Preaching (Billy Sunday), March 1915
- crayon, pen and ink, brush and ink,
- wash on board
- 14 13/16 x 28 5/16 inches
-
- 13. Standing Nude Bending Forward (Standing Nude), Winter 1916
- crayon on paper
- 13 7/16 x 11 _ inches
-
- 14. Standing Nude Bending Forward, 1916
- lithograph
- 12 _ x 10 1/8 inches
-
- 15. The Old Rascal, Winter 1916
- crayon, pen and ink on paper
- 9 3/16 x 7 _ inches
-
- 16. Preliminaries (Preliminaries to the Big Bout), Spring 1916
- crayon, ink and brush on paper
- 17 22 _ inches
-
- 17. Preliminaries to the Big Bout, 1916
- lithograph
- 15 _ x 19 _ inches
-
- 18. Well at Quevado, Fall 1917
- graphite, crayon, pen and ink, ink wash,
- and brush on board
- 10 x 15 5/8 inches
-
- 19. Four Figures in a Room (Two Girls), Winter 1917
- graphite on paper
- 4 15/16 x 6 1/8 inches
-
- 20. Two Girls, 1917
- lithograph
- 7 5/8 x 8 7/8 inches
-
- 21. A Knock Down, circa. 19171921
- crayon on paper
- 15 x 19 3/16 inches
-
- 22. The White Hope, 1921
- lithograph
- 14 _ x 18 _ inches
-
- 23. Base Hospital, 19161918
- crayon on board
- 11 _ x 9 _ inches
-
- 24. The Last Victim, SpringWinter 1918
- graphite, crayon, brush and ink wash on board
- 19 x 23 11/16 inches
-
- 25. Return of the Useless, SpringWinter 1918
- graphite, crayon and black ink on board
- 19 _ x 12 11/16 inches
-
- 26. The Barricade, Spring-Winter 1918
- crayon on board
- 17 3/16 x 28 7/8 inches
-
- 27. Doves and Figures, Fall 1918
- crayon on ragboard
- 19 9/16 x 15 _ inches
-
- 28. Hail to Peace, Christmas, 1918, 1919
- lithograph
- 4 _ x 3 _ inches
-
- 29. The Beach and Girl on Beach (on the reverse Study
for Legs of the Sea), June 1919
- graphite on paper
- 6 5/8 x 8 1/8 inches
-
- 30. The Beach (Legs of the Sea), June 1919
- crayon on paper
- 14 _ x 20 11/16 inches
-
- 31. Legs of the Sea, 1921
- lithograph
- 8 _ x 10 5/8 inches
-
- 32. Study for Bathing Beach, Summer 1918 or 1919
- crayon on paper
- 10 3/8 x 7 7/8 inches
-
- 33. Study for Bathing Beach (Girl on Sand), Summer 1918 or 1919
- crayon on paper
- 8 x 10 5/8 inches
-
- 34. Bathing Beach, 1921
- lithograph
- 8 3/8 x 7 inches
-
- 35. Study for Indooor Athlete No. 1, Winter 1917Winter
1921
- graphite on paper
- 7 7/8 x 7 1/16 inches
-
- 36. Indoor Athlete, No. 1, 1921
- lithograph
- 6 _ x 9 _ inches
-
- 37. Study for Indoor Athlete No. 2, Winter 1917Winter 1921
- crayon or graphite on paper
- 6 5/46 x 5 _ inches
-
- 38. Parade Forms on the Right (Spring, Central Park), 1921
- crayon on paper
- 18 3/8 x 16 11/16 inches
-
- 39. Introducing Georges Carpentier, July 1921
- crayon on paper
- 19 x 25 _ inches
-
- 40. Elsie, Figure, 1921
- crayon on brown paper
- 11 11/16 x 5 7/8 inches
-
- 41. Elsie, 1921
- crayon on paper
- 14 1/8 x 10 _ inches
-
- 42. Elsie, Emma and Marjorie, No. 1, 1921
- lithograph
- 9 5/8 x 12 _ inches
-
- 43. Punchinello,
- January and February 1922
- crayon on paper
- 9 11/16 x 6 inches
-
- 44. Punchinello in the House of Death, January and February
1922
- graphite, in and brush on board
- 16 _ x 19 5/8 inches
-
- 45. Punchinello in the House of Death, 1923
- lithograph
- 16 x 19 3/8 inches
-
- 46. Study for The Irish Fair, January and February 1922
- crayon on paper
- 9 _ x 5 7/16 inches
-
- 47. The Irish Fair, 1923
- lithograph
- 18 7/8 x 21 3/8 inches
-
- 48. Builders, Winter 1922
- crayon on paper
- 12 3/8 x 10 1/8 inches
-
- 49. The Battle, Winter 1922Spring 1923
- crayon on board
- 24 _ x 20 inches
-
- 50. The Return to Life, Winter 1922Spring 1923
- crayon, chalk, ink wash and brush on paper
- 12 _ x 10 1/16 inches
-
- 51. The Law Is Too Slow, Winter 19221923
- crayon on board
- 21 1/8 x 16 15/16 inches
-
- 52. The Law Is Too Slow, 1923
- lithograph
- 17 7/8 x 14 _ inches
-
- 53. Girl Sewing, circa Winter 1923
- crayon on paper
- 12 _ x 10 1/8 inches
-
- 54. Sixteen East Gay Street, Summer 1923
- crayon on paper
- 9 _ x 11 _ inches
-
- 55. The Appeal to the People, SummerFall 1923
- graphite, crayon and chalk on paper
- 14 1/8 x 18 3/8 inches
-
- 56. The Dead Line, circa 1923
- crayon, pen and ink on paper
- 12 x 10 7/8 inches
-
- 57. Energizing the Broken (Salvation Army), June 1924
- crayon, ink wash and brush, opaque watercolor
- and brush on paper
- 17 15/16 x 17 7/8 inches
-
-
- Additional paintings (Portland venue only)
-
- 58. An Island in the Sea, 1911
- oil on canvas
- 34 1/4 x 44 3/8
- Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Gift of Howard B. Monett, 1952.025
-
- 59. Riverfront No. 1, 1915
- oil on canvas
- 45 3/8 x 63 1/8
- Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Museum purchase, Howald Fund, 1951.011
-
- 60. Matinicus, 1916
- oil on canvas
- 32 x 40