George Wesley Bellows Essay Research Paper Have

George Wesley Bellows Essay, Research Paper

Have you ever seen a painting of two fighters going at it hot and heavy on a stag night. If you have, then chances are that you have just seen a painting of George Bellows.s from Tom Sharkey.s Athletic Club in New York City. Prizefights were among some of his favorite subjects, although he only did few paintings of them. George Wesley Bellows was an American realist painter in the 20th century. He was thought of as an artist of the Ashcan school, although he wasn.t one of .The Eight,. which included George Henri and other well-known artists who painted images of the city and life there. His career included paintings of urban images as well as landscapes and portraits. Although his career was cut short at an early age, his paintings reflected America and everyday life in it.

George Bellows began his painting career in the early 1900s. He painted what was happening in the world at that time and it has been said that there were aspects of Bellows. work, which were in advance of their time rather than abreast of or behind it. He can be thought of as the true progenitor of the American social realists of the 1930s and 1940s (Lucie-Smith 70). Early in his painting career, his casual scenes of people at leisure shone with the effortless grace that dignified all his work (von Hartz 31).

There were many influences on Bellows in his lifetime. The most significant of these influences was from the painter Robert Henri. Bellows was a pupil of Henri.s at the New York School of Art, and Henri was the dominant influence in his early work. They developed a close relationship and Bellows later called Henri, .my father in art. because he was such an influential and charismatic teacher (Hunter Museum 1). Although he never traveled abroad, through international exhibitions and teachers like Henri, Bellows was somewhat influenced by the art of Europe (Wasserman 81). Thomas Eakins was another artist who had a strong influence on him from the very start and continued to be influential throughout Bellows.s life (Lucie-Smith 69). Later in his life, he painted many memorable portraits of middle-aged and elderly women, which was due to his fascination with women (Oates 65). It can be seen that his wife and daughters inspired him also, as he made many paintings of them (Macmillian 19). At the beginning of his career, he played semi-pro baseball on the weekends in New York, which was how he supported himself before starting to paint. That predilection for sports lured him to Sharkey.s Club, which led to his many paintings of fight scenes (von Hartz 31). As a rugged athlete, later very much a family man, he fitted into the society he pictured. (Davidson 123). Living in New York was beneficial to him because both the city.s dynamic architecture and depressing poor influenced his work (Adams 1). The war years proved to be a turning point for each of the Ashcan Artists. After 1917, none of them devoted full attention to the interpreting life in New York. Turning away from topical subjects observed on the street, most of them concentrated on landscape, still life, portraiture, and figure studies that allowed them to investigate problems of design and color (Mecklenburg, Snyder, and Zurier 83). George and his family spent many summers on the coast of Maine, where the stark, windswept seascapes and landscapes proved a fresh source of inspiration for him. He rendered the landscapes with a starkness and purity at odds with the idealized naturalism of academic romanticism (Macmillian 17). With so many different influences, his paintings were diverse and distinct and continued to expose the world.

Bellows developed his style of painting throughout his life. Bellows was a student in Henri.s school, where he learned to use the world around him as the subject of his work. He revealed his concern for basic aesthetic principles through his carefully structured compositions. He said, .An artist who doesn.t use his imagination is a mechanic. a drawing is not a copy but an invention. (Reynolda 1). Throughout the period of developing his own style, descriptive line was the bedrock of his art. It can be found in the many illustrations he made for newspapers and magazines (Green 2). In many of his early works, Bellows composed a large number of seemingly unrelated forms into an energetic and unified composition. No body of work better illustrates the transition between two styles than that of Bellows. At first he chose for his subject.s moments when life ran high- the teeming streets of New York, the circus, the boxing ring, and the waterfront (Mendelowitz 319). In his later work, he focused on mostly landscapes and portraits. Between 1907 and 1924, he executed numerous paintings and lithographs of boxers that revealed a technical familiarity with boxing culture (Oates 63). In 1909 he set up a New York studio near the Athletic Club in order to be close to the prizefights, which were his favorite subject (Wasserman 81). In his earlier paintings such as .Stag at Sharkey.s,. Bellows captured the emotional energy of his subject. He never lost interest in portraying the human figure as a striking physical and emotional presence in his work (Adams 1). After acquiring a lithography press a few years later, he shifted his interest from brush technique to the compositional structure (Macmillian 18). Some paintings show Bellows.s interest in the kind of geometrically plann