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GEORGE BELLOWS
(1882—1925)
“The Eight” were by no means an isolated phenomenon. The social realism of Henri, Sloan and Luks was maintained and developed further by the younger generation of artists who were Henri’s pupils. The most remarkable of them were Bellows, Hopper and Kent.
George Bellows was closely associated with the Ash Can School. He was one of the most powerful exponents of realistic tradition which through his sizable contribution became firmly established in America. He continued the exploration of the city life, begun by Eakins in the seventies of the nineteenth century. Bellows was a stronger painter than Henri and his followers and he went further than they. His range of subjects is more diverse and deeper in social content. He found his subject matter at sports clubs, at construction sites, in tenement areas, on the teeming river fronts. He painted scenes of prize boxing and circus performances, city streets and parks flooded with crowds, dockers and builders, hospitals and prisons, slum and Negro lynching scenes — the whole multiform and dramatic world of everyday life. The artist’s relentless critical realism is expressed with tremendous power in such lithographs as Blessing In Georgia (1916), where a prison priest is preaching at the imprisoned Negroes in irons, or The Law is Too Slow — a wrathful indictment of the appalling crimes of bourgeois reaction.
To the First World War he responded with two highly tragic anti-war compositions — The Return of the Useless, showing the crippled and disabled French prisoners of war returning from a German captivity, and the Murder of Edith Cavell-a pathetic scene just before the shooting of the British nurse who had helped wounded prisoners to escape from Belgium when it was occupied by the Germans.
The fine oils, the Men of the Docks and The Cliff Dwellers, throw light on the seamy sides of a large city with all its dramatic squalor. Bellows also painted spacious lyrical landscapes, scenes of recreations and subtle portraits which were a striking contrast to the dark and cruel world condemned by the artist.