George ran across a copy of the Bryce Reports, those eye-witness testimonies of German atrocities from the early days of fighting, and he was absorbed and horrified by their contents. Man’s inhumanity to man was a challenge* to which he always rose. (,..}
In April, 1918, the Kaiser’s armies began their final desperate drive at the heart of France. Again civilian refugees clogged” the roads with their pitiful belongings. The uncertain terrors of enemy occupation were resumed. One day, early in the month, Bellows picked up his lithographic crayon and began an astonishing series of prints, the twentieth-century version of Goya’s Disasters of War. The Spanish master had long been one of his favourites, but this new portfolio would have been created in any case. The scenes simply exploded onto the stones.
By the end of May Bellows had produced sixteen prints and two variants of these, an amazing record of more than two designs a week. Even more astonishing is the variety in the compositions. A central triangle is common, and Hambidge’s root five rectangle provides the basis for The Enemy Arrive, Sergeant Delaney, and Massacred. The parallel plane limitations ?’ Dynamic Symmetry he varied with designs in space, and “i Sniped he laid the basis for the composition of his Crucifixion Painted five years later.
These eighteen stones produced a grim indictment of war, s°rnetimes as moving, often as revolting as that of Goya’s or of his French predecessor, Jacques Callot. Violence is there, and tension, melodrama, and tragedy. George’s Massacreta lacks the instantaneous impact of Goya’s Madrilenos, but his Last Victim outdoes Daumier in its stark intensity. Th3 simple dignity of Bellows’ The Murder of Edith Cavell appears1 in the work of neither of his precursors, (…)
(…) In July he produced the oil-painting Massacre at Dinant, and followed it at one-month intervals with The Germans Arrive, Edith Cavell, and The Barricade. (…)
The Murder of Edith Cavell was exhibited at the Anderson Galleries. (…) As he had caught the perfect expression of physical violence in Stag at Sharkey’s, here he presented j the anticipation of violent death with tragic calm.
No single episode in the war so aroused public indignation against the Germans as did their execution of Miss Cavell, a British nurse, before a firing squad. Nothing incidental or momentary entered into George’s interpretation of the scene; . rather, he gave it through its quiet restraint a timeless universality, relying on vivid contrasts of values to stress the drama of the episode.
(Charles H. Morgan. George Bellows. “Painter of America”)

Elinor, Jean and Anna is a most successful group portrait. He worked a long time preparing this big canvas, basing his whole design on a simple root five triangle from Hambidge’s Dynamic Symmetry, Excitedly, he placed every centre and every contrast within the rigid but intricate geometric framework-Yet the outcome of the group portrait gives no suggestion of such contriving, and it seems certain Bellows’ mind had already grasped the fundamentals of the composition before he ever subjected It to a mathematical formula. He placed Jean, a small white triangle, in the centre. The turn of her head to the left was just enough to set the hunched little body of Aurit Fanny in balance with monumental bulk of Gram Bellows. probably no finer expression exists of the exquisite contrast between childhood and old age.
(Charles H. Morgan. George Bellows. “Painter of America”)
In Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) Bellows maximized the moment of physical contact and bloody violence in the prize fight, held before a group of avid spectators. His Cliff Dwellers (1913) is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and richly painted evocations of tenement life in the vital and ramshackle New York slums. He defines his human characters broadly as slovenly but pleasant and good-natured figures, with an earthy, gamin charm. Their energies spill out of the frame, and are matched by an appropriately loose, exuberant brush-work.
(Milton Brown, Sam Hunter and others. American Art)

George was painting again. He began in December witm Snow Dumpers, a dynamic composition of canted tugs and pawing horses keeping an uneasy balance under the sweep of the Brooklyn Bridge. January saw a brief change of pace in Winter Road; by February he was reworking the dock-side theme with Men of the Docks, one of his starkest and most monumental interpretations of life in the big metropolis. (…)
Among the drawings he submitted to The Masses was one of the slums, entitled in proper Socialist fashion, Why Don’t They All Go to the Country for Vacation. He now turned this into his most monumental painting of life in the tenements. Tall buildings crowd in on a swarming street, a horse car pushes its way among carts, sportive urchins, and scolding mothers. Higher up, figures lean out of windows and over fire escapes, and festoons of laundry dangle in the hot still air. The Cliff Dwellers provided the picture with a better title than that of the original drawing.
<…) A Day in June and Approach to the Bridge, Night show a dramatic change of moods. One canvas is bright and warm and still, the other seems dark and turbulent, a great sweep of lighted pavement swinging up to the distant bridge and a thunderhead elbowing its way across the moon. <–.)
In July, he reverted to a very simple triad of blue, yellow, and red to produce what is perhaps his finest portrait of his wife, Emma at the Piano. She sits, half-turned away from the instrument, her right arm extended and her hand resting on the keys. Her handsome, even features appear in three-quarter view, her magnificent eyes illuminating the broadly modeled face. The arm and hesitating hand and the ivory fronts of the piano keys form a powerful horizontal across the lower part of the canvas. Henri’s simplicity and strength and dramatic contrasts of light and shade are all here, yet Beilows1 master never achieved so striking a blend of intimacy and universal charm. <(…)

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.