George Wesley Bellows

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George Wesley Bellows

George Wesley Bellows (born August 12, 1882 in Columbus , Ohio , † January 8, 1925 in New York City ) was an American painter , draftsman and lithographer who was best known for his pictures of city life in New York. Due to his choice of motif, he was assigned to the Ashcan School . He was also one of the main exponents of American realism in the early 20th century.

Life

Early years and education

Pennsylvania Station Excavation by Night , 1909

George Wesley Bellows was born in a middle-class household in Columbus , Ohio and was the only child of his parents described as conservative. His father was an architect and builder, the family descended from the founders of Bellows Falls , Vermont . He studied English literature from 1901 to 1904 at Ohio State University , where he also played basketball and baseball . In painting he was promoted mainly by his first teacher, the amateur painter JR Taylor. Motivated by his work on the annual reports, he left university a year before graduation to become an illustrator. He came to New York City in 1904 and enrolled at the New York School of Art of the painter William Merritt Chase , where he met his teacher and his role model Robert Henri , with whom he took evening classes from 1909. Henri became his lifelong friend and mentor, he referred to himself as "my father". In 1910 he spent a month drawing with Henri on Mongehan Island in Maine , a place to which he often returned in the following years.

Robert Henri was one of the founders of an art movement that later became known as the " Ashcan School " ( "garbage can art" ). He motivated his students to get their inspiration from big city life and to paint based on the experiences made here. His vision was an art that should lead to a typically American and democratic art and thus stood in opposition to the ideals of American Impressionism . Bellows got involved in this type of painting and inspiration and adopted his teacher's philosophy. Other influential teachers were Hardesty Gilmore Maratta , who influenced Bellows through his color theories , and Jay Hambridge , whose theory of dynamic symmetry was at the center of Bellow's later work.

Growing awareness and climax

Cliff Dwellers , 1913

After only five years in New York City, Bellows had made a name for himself with his own style of American realism and created highly acclaimed works. In 1907 the first of his well-known series of excavation work for the Pennsylvania Station was created and his boxer series also began at this time.

In 1908 he began his own teaching activities at the University of Virginia , from 1910 to 1911 and later again from 1918 to 1919 he taught composition and nudes at the Art Students League of New York and from 1912 to 1918 at the Ferrer School . In 1909 he became the youngest associate member of the National Academy of Design , where he became a full member in 1913. Although he was not a member of the artist group The Eight of his teacher Robert Henri, he also took part in the Independent Artist Organization co-organized by him in 1910, which turned against the established Academy. In 1913 he was a co-organizer and exhibitor at the controversial Armory Show . From 1911 he was also a member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and in 1916 a founding member of the Society of Independent Artists .

Family and death

During his time at the New York School of Art, Bellows met his future wife, Emma L. Story. The couple married in 1910 and bought a house on the Upper East Side in New York, where much of his painting was created in the years that followed. The first of their two children, Anne, was born in 1911; the second daughter, Jean, was born in 1915. In 1920 Bellows first came to Woodstock , New York, and in 1922 he built a house with a studio here, which he increasingly used as a workplace. Since 1918 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

At the beginning of January 1925, Bellows suffered a ruptured appendix and died on January 8, 1925, at the age of 42, of peritonitis caused by it .

In 1926 the Metropolitan Museum of Art honored Bellows with a special exhibition.

Artistic work

painting

Dempsey and Firpo , 1924

As an enthusiastic and active athlete, sports representations repeatedly represented a popular motif in his work, of which his pictures of boxing matches became known. In addition, however, he also painted scenes from other sports such as tennis or baseball .

The focus of his work were scenes from the big city life in New York, especially scenes from the streets and pubs. The big city stress presented in these pictures was underlined by his quick brushwork. The main characters in this painting were workers and people in the crowd, popular motifs were also construction sites and cityscapes. In his later work he also increasingly painted scenes on the Hudson River and New York bridges and then also quieter landscapes and seascapes .

Portrait of Anne , 1915

After his marriage and the birth of his two daughters, he also devoted himself to portraiture , where his family was a frequent subject. The calm depictions in his portraits represent a very strong contrast to the restless depictions of sports and cities.

Drawing and graphics

Throughout his career, Bellows has also worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for a number of magazines including Harper's Weekly , Collier’s , Vanity Fair , Metropolitan and the socialist magazine The Masses . He also created a large number of sketches and drawings, some of which he converted into lithographs.

From 1916 he began to occupy himself with lithography , which at that time only had a commercial character in America. Bellows used the printing technique for the artistic implementation of his ideas and created over 170 lithographs in collaboration with the art printers George Miller and Bolton Brown. After 1918 he produced a comprehensive series of lithographs of his boxer paintings as well as caricatured discussions about the First World War , in which he also experimented with geographical design elements, especially grids. These works were viewed as a rediscovery of technique for art, and Bellows has been compared in reviews to artists such as Francisco de Goya and Honoré Daumier .

Selection of works

  • Pennsylvania Station Excavation (1907)

  • Blue Snow the Battery (1910)

  • A Morning Snow Hudson River (1910)

  • New York (1911)

  • Edith Cavell (1918)

  • Massacre at Dinant (1918)

  • Emma at the Window (1920)

  • North River (1908)

Exhibitions

literature

  • Claudia Meifert: Bellows, George Wesley. In: General Artists Dictionary (AKL). The visual artists of all times and peoples. Saur, Munich and Leipzig 1991ff., ISBN 3-598-22740-X .
  • Stephan Koja: America. The New World in 19th Century Pictures. Prestel-Verlag 1999; Pp. 180-181 and pp. 252-253. ISBN 3-7913-2051-3 .
  • Marianne Doezema: Bellows, George Wesley. American National Biography online.

further reading

  • Marianne Dozema: George Bellows in Urban America. Yale 1992.
  • Jane Myers, Linda Ayres: George Bellows. The Artist and his Lithographs, 1916-1924. Exhibition catalog Amon Carter Museum, New York 1988.
  • Michael Quick et al .: The Paintings of George Bellows. Exhibition catalog Amon Carter Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York 1992.

Web links

Commons : George Wesley Bellows  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ David Bernard Dearinger: Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design, Vol 1, Hudson Hills., 2004 ISBN 978-1-55595-029-3 .
  2. ↑ David Bernard Dearinger: Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design , Vol I (pp 38f).
  3. ^ Henry Adams: George Bellows Biography. Thomas French Fine Art / George Bellows Family Trust.
  4. ^ Members: George Wesley Bellows. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 15, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Bellows, George Wesley
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Columbus , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1925
Place of death New York City