Bellows, George

George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925), a painter and printmaker of urban scenes, was born in Columbus, Ohio, on August 12, 1882, the only child of builder George Bellows and Anna Smith Bellows. Bellows entered Ohio State University in 1901 and left without completing his degree in 1904 to study illustration at the New York School of Art. He worked under Robert Henri, founder of the Ashcan School, which specialized in gritty paintings of urban life. Fascinated by the teeming life around him, Bellows gradually abandoned mannered drawings in favor of realistic depictions of street life. By 1906, he had opened his own studio.

Bellows, known for the remarkable diversity as well as the realism of his work, made an unusually rapid rise to the top of the art world. Crosseyed Boy (1906), a study of a New York street urchin, first attracted the public to Bellows's art. Fortytwo Kids (1907), his first sale, showed a group of naked boys frolicking along the dirty waterfront of the East River in the manner that children had once gathered along swimming holes. With North River (1908), a portrayal of an urban landscape, Bellows had the honor of seeing his work purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for its permanent collection. Stag at Sharkey's (1907), the most popular of Bellows's six boxing paintings, spotlighted brutal fighters and the pleasure of bloodthirsty spectators. It is the best known of his works today. Cliff Dwellers (1913) depicted wash day among the working class on New York's Lower East Side. A Day in June (1913) showed a fashionable throng in Central Park. The portrait Little Girl in White (1907) won the National Academy of Design's first Hallgarten Prize in 1913. Elected to the National Academy in 1909, Bellows became a full member in 1913.

Bellows, never particularly strong as a colorist, limited his palette to a range that verged on monochromatic. Toward the end of his short life, he began using more color. His first painting method combined thoughtful premeditation with spontaneous selfexpression. By 1913, Bellows displayed a growing interest in laws of design and in carefully composing his canvases in accordance with them. His compositions were built along a geometrical framework.

Though best known for his oil paintings, Bellows provided illustrations for masscirculation magazines, including Collier's, Everybody's, Harper's Weekly, and Century. In 1913, after embracing socialism, he contributed free illustrations to the radical magazine The Masses. In 1916, Bellows began making lithographs, and his work contributed to the revival of interest in lithography in the United States.

[Page 75]Bellows married Emma Story in 1910. A devoted family man, Bellows featured his wife and two daughters in many of his paintings and drawings, and the oil painting Emma and Her Children (1923) is considered among his best works. Bellows succumbed to a ruptured appendix on January 8, 1925.