George Bellows

George WesleyBellows' middle name was bestowed by his mother in the earnest hope that the child would become a Methodist Bishop. Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio.His family home was a sturdy brick house at 265 East Rich Street in Columbus. He was the only child of George Bellows and Anna Wilhelmina Smith Bellows (he had a half-sister, Laura, 18 years his senior). He was born four years after his parents married, at the ages of fifty (George) and forty (Anna).{{citation|editor-last=Roberts|editor-first=Norma J.|title=The American Collections|publisher=Columbus Museum of Art|year=1988|isbn=0-8109-1811-0|page=[https://archive.org/details/americancollecti0000colu/page/64 64]|url=https://archive.org/details/americancollecti0000colu/page/64}}. His mother was the daughter of a whaling captain based in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and his family returned there for their summer vacations.The boy who chose the brush over baseball Smithsonian, June 1992, pp. 58-70 He began drawing well before kindergarten, and his elementary–school teachers often asked him to decorate their classroom blackboards at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

At age 10, George took to athletics, and trained to be a baseball and basketball player. He became good enough at both sports to play semipro ball for years afterward. During his senior year, a baseball scout from the Indianapolis team made him an offer. He declined, opting to enroll at Ohio State University (1901–1904). There he played for the baseball and basketball teams, and provided illustrations for the Makio, the school's student yearbook. He was encouraged to become a professional baseball player,{{citation|title=George Bellows - Biography |publisher=National Gallery of Art |url=http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tbio?person=2050 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20120629223300/http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tbio?person=2050 |url-status=dead |archive-date=June 29, 2012 |access-date=August 7, 2011 }}. and he worked as a commercial illustrator while a student and continued to accept magazine assignments throughout his life. Despite these opportunities in athletics and commercial art, Bellows desired success as a painter, although his parents didn't encourage it.{{cite web|title=George Bellows|url=https://www.theartstory.org/artist/bellows-george/|access-date=7 August 2022}}His pragmatic father strongly urged Bellows to abandon his painting dreams and become a builder, as his father was. He left Ohio State in 1904, just before he was to graduate, and moved to New York City to study art.

Bellows was soon a student of Robert Henri, who at the time was teaching at the New York School of Art. While studying there, Bellows became associated with Henri's "The Eight" and the Ashcan School, a group of artists who advocated painting contemporary American society in all its forms. By 1906, Bellows and fellow art student Edward Keefe had set up a studio at 1947 Broadway.{{harvnb|Roberts|1988|p=60}}.

File:Bellows CliffDwellers.jpg, (1913), Los Angeles County Museum of Art]]

Bellows first achieved widespread notice in 1908, when he and other pupils of Henri organized an exhibition of mostly urban studies. While many critics considered these to be crudely painted, others found them welcomely audacious, a step beyond the work of his teacher. Bellows taught at the Art Students League of New York in 1909, although he was more interested in pursuing a career as a painter. His fame grew as he contributed to other nationally recognized juried shows.

Bellows' urban New York scenes depicted the crudity and chaos of working-class people and neighborhoods, and satirized the upper classes. From 1907 through 1915, he executed a series of paintings depicting New York City under snowfall. In these paintings Bellows developed his strong sense of light and visual texture,[http://www.tfaoi.com/newsmu/nmus18e.htm George Bellows: Love of Winter] Retrieved July 12, 2007 exhibiting a stark contrast between the blue and white expanses of snow and the rough and grimy surfaces of city structures, and creating an aesthetically ironic image of the equally rough and grimy men struggling to clear away the nuisance of the pure snow. However, Bellows' series of paintings portraying amateur boxing matches were arguably his signature contribution to art history. They are characterized by dark atmospheres, through which the bright, roughly laid brushstrokes of the human figures vividly strike with a strong sense of motion and direction.

File:Waldo Peirce.jpg by George Bellows, on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco]]

File:Blessed are the Peacemakers, Bellows.jpg]]

Growing prestige as a painter brought changes in his life and work. Though he continued his earlier themes, Bellows also began to receive portrait commissions, as well as social invitations, from New York's wealthy elite. Additionally, he followed Henri's lead and began to summer in Maine, painting seascapes on Monhegan and Matinicus islands.

At the same time, the always socially conscious Bellows also associated with a group of radical artists and activists called "the Lyrical Left", who tended towards anarchism in their extreme advocacy of individual rights. He taught at the first Modern School in New York City (as did his mentor, Henri), and served on the editorial board of the socialist journal The Masses, to which he contributed many drawings and prints beginning in 1911. However, he was often at odds with other contributors due to his belief that artistic freedom should trump any ideological editorial policy. Bellows also dissented from this circle in his very public support of U.S. intervention in World War I. In 1918, he created a series of lithographs and paintings that graphically depicted atrocities which the Allies said had been committed by Germany during its invasion of Belgium. Notable among these was The Germans Arrive, which gruesomely illustrated a German soldier restraining a Belgian teen whose hands had just been severed. However, his work was also highly critical of the domestic censorship and persecution of antiwar dissenters conducted by the U.S. government under the Espionage Act.

He was also criticized for some of the liberties he took in capturing scenes of war. The artist Joseph Pennell argued that because Bellows had not witnessed the events he painted firsthand, he had no right to paint them. Bellows responded that he had not been aware that Leonardo da Vinci "had a ticket to paint the Last Supper".{{cite book|last1=Birmingham Museum of Art|title=Birmingham Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection|publisher=Giles|year=2010|location=London|page=142|url=http://www.birminghammuseumstore.org/bmapu.html|access-date=June 27, 2011|isbn=978-1-904832-77-5|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110910171150/http://www.birminghammuseumstore.org/bmapu.html|archive-date=September 10, 2011}}

File:Bellows George Dempsey and Firpo 1924.jpg (1924), Whitney Museum of American Art]]

File:The Law is Too Slow MET 2835-180.jpg, used in anti-lynching publications by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]]

As Bellows' later oils focused more on domestic life, with his wife and daughters as beloved subjects, the paintings also displayed an increasingly programmatic and theoretical approach to color and design, a marked departure from the fluid muscularity of the early work.

One of Bellows' central subjects was the sea, and he painted over 250 scenes of it during the course of his career. The Fisherman (1917), a significant late canvas focusing on the topic that he made while visiting Carmel, California, is in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.{{Cite journal|year=2017|title=New to the Collection|journal=Program|publisher=Amon Carter Museum of American Art|volume=February/July}}

In addition to painting, Bellows made significant contributions to lithography, helping to expand the use of the medium as a fine art in the U.S. He installed a lithography press in his studio in 1916, and between 1921 and 1924 he collaborated with master printer Bolton Brown on more than a hundred images. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art holds one of the largest collections of Bellows' lithographs, a set of 220 prints acquired from the artist's estate in 1985.{{Cite book|title=George Bellows: the Artist and His Lithographs, 1916-1924|last1=Myers|first1=Jane|last2=Ayres|first2=Linda|publisher=Amon Carter Museum|year=1988|isbn=0883600595|location=Fort Worth|oclc=18738812|url=https://archive.org/details/georgebellowsart0000myer}} There are also large collections of his lithographs at the Boston Public Library and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Bellows also illustrated numerous books in his later career, including several by H.G. Wells.

File:George Bellows House, Woodstock, NY.jpg]]

Bellows taught at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1919. In 1920, he began to spend nearly half of each year in Woodstock, New York, where he built a home for his family.[http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/4aa/4aa158.htm Leaving the Country: George Bellows at Woodstock] Retrieved July 12, 2007 He died on January 8, 1925, in New York City, of peritonitis, after failing to tend to a ruptured appendix.{{Cite web|url=http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/4aa/4aa158.htm|title=Leaving the Country: George Bellows at Woodstock|website=www.tfaoi.com|access-date=August 7, 2019}} He was survived by his wife, Emma Story Bellows (married 1910), and daughters Anne and Jean. Bellows is buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. "Of American artists of the first rank," wrote Joyce Carol Oates, "none had a more tragically foreshortened career than Bellows.... [He was] the most famous American artist of his time."Oates, Joyce Carol, George Bellows: American Artist. Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1995, p. 7.

Paintings and prints by George Bellows are in the collections of many major and regional American art museums, including the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, Texas, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, and the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The Hyde Collection, in Glens Falls, New York. The Columbus Museum of Art in Bellows' hometown also has a sizeable collection of both his portraits and New York street scenes. The White House acquired his 1919 painting Three Children in 2007, and it is now displayed in the Green Room.

The Whitney Museum published a biography of Bellows by fellow artist George William Eggers as part of the American Artists Series. In 1992 it mounted an extensive exhibition of his art (the exhibition was a joint venture with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds his papers.

File:George Bellows - Men of the Docks - 1912 - The National Gallery.jpg, 1912]]

His work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.{{cite web|url=https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/921781 |title=George Bellows |work=Olympedia |access-date=4 August 2020}}

In December 1999, Polo Crowd, a 1910 painting, sold for U.S.$27.5 million to billionaire Bill Gates.{{cite web|url=http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/134488 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20130201105558/http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/134488 |url-status=dead |archive-date=February 1, 2013 |title=Museum opens with less to see |work=Roanoke.com }} In November 2008, Bellows' Men of the Docks, a 1912 painting of the Brooklyn docks spanning the East River and depicting the Manhattan skyline in the background, was to be auctioned at Christie's in New York. It was expected to set the record for an American painting sold at auction with an estimate of $25–35 million.{{cite news|url=https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/1126/218.html|work=Forbes|title=Ashcan on Fire|date=November 26, 2007}} The painting's sale however was a source of controversy at Randolph College because it was the first masterpiece purchased for the Maier Museum of Art by students and locals who raised $2,500 to purchase it in 1920.{{cite web|url=http://www.newsweek.com/id/42498|title=A Shot Through the Art|work=Newsweek|date=October 9, 2007}} Due to a series of lawsuits and the deflated art market, the painting remained unsold{{cite magazine|url=https://entertainment.time.com/2008/03/10/maier/|magazine=Time|title=Look Out Bellows–Looking Around|date=March 10, 2008}} until 2014 when it became the first major American painting to be purchased by the British National Gallery in London.{{cite news|first=Nick|last=Clark|title=National Gallery spends $25.5m on George Bellows' Men of the Docks – its first major American painting|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/national-gallery-spends-255m-on-george-bellows-men-of-the-docks--its-first-major-american-painting-9113161.html|newspaper=The Independent|location=London|date=February 7, 2014|access-date=February 7, 2014}}

In 2001, Thomas French Fine Art became the exclusive agent of the George Bellows Family Trust.{{Cite web|url=http://www.georgebellows.com/|title=George Bellows|website=www.georgebellows.com|access-date=August 7, 2019}}

Randolph College was asked by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to lend Men of the Docks, for inclusion in a 2012 exhibition.{{cite web|title=George Bellows|url=http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/bellowsinfo.shtm|work=Exhibitions|publisher=National Gallery of Art|year=2012|access-date=February 7, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150221121047/http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/bellowsinfo.shtm|archive-date=February 21, 2015|url-status=dead}} A major Bellows retrospective was held at the Royal Academy in London in 2013. Men of the Docks is now in the National Gallery in London.

In November 2021, the Columbus Museum of Art opened the George Bellows Center to encourage exhibitions, publications and scholarly research on his life and work. Noted Bellows scholar Mark Cole of the Cleveland Museum of Art presented a lecture on Bellows' life with a specific focus on sports subjects in his work.{{Cite news|last=Dafoe|first=Taylor|date=November 4, 2021|title=Why Does George Bellows Matter Today? A New Research Center Argues the Artist Embodies All of America's Contradictions|work=Artnet|url=https://news.artnet.com/art-world/new-research-center-dedicated-to-george-bellows-columbus-ohio-2030377|access-date=November 5, 2021}}

{{-}}

File:Central Park George Wesley Bellows.jpeg|Central Park (1905)

File:George Bellows, Pennsylvania Excavation (Smith Coll Mus Art 2010.11).jpg|Pennsylvania Excavation (1907), Smith College Museum of Art

File:George Wesley Bellows - Pennsylvania Station Excavation - Google Art Project.jpg|Pennsylvania Station Excavation (1907), Brooklyn Museum

File:George Wesley Bellows - Frankie, the Organ Boy - Google Art Project.jpg|Frankie, the Organ Boy (1907), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

File:Steaming Streets, George Bellows, March 1908.jpeg|Steaming Streets (1908)

File:George Bellows - North River (1908).jpg|North River (1908), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

File:Blue Morning 1909 George Bellows.jpg|Blue Morning (1909)

File:George Wesley Bellows - Summer Night, Riverside Drive (1909).jpg|Summer Night, Riverside Drive (1909), Columbus Museum of Art

File:George Wesley Bellows - Bridge, Blackwell’s Island - Google Art Project.jpg|The Bridge, Blackwell's Island (1909), Toledo Museum of Art

File:Bellows George Blue Snow the Battery 1910.jpg|Blue Snow the Battery (1910)

A Morning Snow-Hudson River at the Brooklyn Museum (80534)a.jpg|A Morning Snow Hudson River (1910)

File:George Bellows - New York.jpg|New York (1911)

File:Evening Blue George Wesley Bellows.jpeg|Evening Blue (1913)

File:Emma at the Piano George Bellows 1914.jpeg|Emma at the Piano, (1914)

File:George Wesley Bellows - A Grandmother (1914).jpg|A Grandmother, 1914, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

File:George-Bellows-River-Front-1-1915.jpg|River Front 1, 1915

File:George Bellows - nude-girl-and-parrot.jpg|Nude with a Parrot (1915)

File:GW Bellows Potrrait of Anne 1915.jpg|Portrait of Anne (Bellows' daughter, 1915)

File:George Bellows Saw Dust Trail 1916 Milwaukee.jpg|The Sawdust Trail (1916), Milwaukee Art Museum

File:George Bellows Builders of Ships.jpg|Builders of Ships (1916)

File:Breaking Sky Monhegan George Bellows.jpeg|Breaking Sky, Monhegan, (ca. 1916)

File:George Bellows - The Fisherman (1917).jpg|The Fisherman (1917), Amon Carter Museum of American Art

File:George Bellows, Edith Cavell (1918).jpg|Edith Cavell (1918), Springfield Museums

File:George W. Bellows - Massacre at Dinant.JPG|Massacre at Dinant (1918)

File:The Barricade by George Wesley Bellows - BMA.jpg|The Barricade (1918)

File:Bellows - Tennis at Newport - 1919.jpeg|Tennis at Newport (1919)

File:George Bellows - Three Children - Google Art Project.jpg|Three Children (1919), White House Art Collection

File:Bellows George Emma at the Window 1920.jpg|Emma at the Window (1920)

File:George Bellows self-portrait.jpg|Self-portrait, (1921) Lithograph

File:George Bellows - Katherine Rosen (1921).jpg|Katherine Rosen (1921)

File:Emma in a Purple Dress - Bellows 1920-23.jpg|Emma in a Purple Dress (1920–23), Dallas Museum of Art

File:Lady Jean by George Wesley Bellows 1924.jpeg|Lady Jean (portrait of Bellows' daughter, Jean), 1924, Yale University Art Gallery

File:Bellows George Summer Fantasy 1924.jpg|Summer Fantasy (1924)

{{external media|width=210px|float=right|headerimage=210px|video1={{YouTube|E3OmAaasGnA|The Art of Boxing -- "George Bellows" at the National Gallery of Art}}, National Gallery of Art (Washington){{cite web|title="The Art of Boxing" -- "George Bellows" at the National Gallery of Art|publisher=National Gallery of Art|date=September 26, 2012|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3OmAaasGnA|access-date=March 13, 2013}}|video2=[http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/Ashcan-School.html Bellows' Pennsylvania Station Excavation], Smarthistory}}

• Ashcan school
• Logan Medal of the arts

{{Reflist}}

{{Commons category|George Wesley Bellows}}

• [http://www.hvallison.com/Default.aspx George Bellows’ Catalogue Raisonné]
• [http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/bellows_george_wesley.html Artcyclopedia list of works by George Bellows online]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20071211180507/http://www.sdmart.org/bellows/art.html An American Pulse: The Lithographs of George Bellows, San Diego Museum of Art]
• [http://www.frickart.com/programs/exhibitions/detail/81.html The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library, exhibited at the Frick]
• [http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=61 George Bellows Gallery at MuseumSyndicate] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160604041205/http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=61 |date=June 4, 2016 }}
• [https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/sets/72157604470957371/ The Boston Public Library's George Wesley Bellows set on Flickr.com]
• [https://archivesspace.amherst.edu/repositories/2/resources/124 George Wesley Bellows Papers], Amherst College Archives & Special Collections {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100621053445/http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/amherst/ma117_main.html |date=June 21, 2010 }}
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20120405072253/http://www.artsbma.org/collectionitemdetails?searchlayout=grid&showform=0&ordering=popular&searchphrase=exact&areas%5B0%5D=portfolio&searchartistname=George%20Wesley%20Bellows,%20United%20States,%20(1882-1925)&areas%5B%5D=portfolio&searchlayout=details&limit=1&start=0 The Barricade] at the Birmingham Museum of Art
• [https://www.corcoran.org/collection/forty-two-kidsForty-two Kids, 1907] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191227021136/https://www.corcoran.org/collection/forty-two-kids |date=December 27, 2019 }} at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• [http://www.green-wood.com/burial_results/index.php Green-Wood Cemetery Burial Search]
• {{Gutenberg author|id=36546| name=George Bellows}}
• {{Internet Archive author|sname=George Wesley Bellows}}

{{George Bellows}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bellows, George}}

Category:1882 births

Category:1925 deaths

Category:20th-century American painters

Category:American male painters

Category:American realist painters

Category:American modern painters

Category:Art Students League of New York faculty

Category:Students of Robert Henri

Category:Ohio State University alumni

Category:Artists from Columbus, Ohio

Category:Deaths from peritonitis

Category:Painters from Ohio

Category:Burials at Green-Wood Cemetery

Category:Artists from Woodstock, New York

Category:20th-century American printmakers

Category:American anti–World War I activists

Category:Olympic competitors in art competitions

Category:20th-century American male artists

Category:Ashcan School people

Category:World War I propaganda