GEORGE BELLOWS: MODERN AMERICAN LIFE

I had meant to write about George Bellows right after I saw the exhibition a few weeks ago—now there's only a week left for you to get to Royal Academy and do the same, because it is a superlative show that reveals Bellows as a pivotal, and major, artist, and raises the question of where he might have gone had he not died at only 42.

The response in the local press was somewhat lukewarm. Most reviews concentrated on the work for which Bellows is best known, his boxing paintings, particularly Stag At Sharkey's (1909), which is a magnificent work, its power intensified in person and close up. Bellows himself was more interested in the atmosphere around the ring than the dynamic scene he paints inside it, and by the time he produced an oil of Dempsey and Firpo (1924) his perspective has changed considerably—Firpo is a figure of heroism in the centre of a more static crowd—and the lights up in the rafters look on like the staring eyes of jealous dieties. To miss the difference between these two approaches, which span virtually the whole of Bellows' serious career, is to miss his growth, and luckily the RA also shows Preliminaries To The Big Bout (1916), White Hope (1921—the Jess Willard/Jack Johnson fight) in which the battlers exude tiredness, and the triumphant Johnson seems seriously out of shape, and an earlier version, Dempsey Through The Ropes which focuses on the power of Firpo's follow-through.

This might make Bellows appear a genre painter, but he is far more than that, though again the British reviews seemed to care more about what he wasn't—namely an Impressionist. Yes you can see the influence of Manet, and Whistler, but to call him a failed Impressionist is to miss the point. Even Richard Dorment, who didn't miss the point and wrote of Bellows' relationship to Robert Henri and the Ash Can school (and linked it perceptively to Sickert and Camden Town) somehow managed to transform Bellows' contemporary John Sloan into John Soane! But seeing Bellows in terms of Impressionism is missing, most crucially, the point of the exhibition's subtitle, 'Modern American Life', and fails to put Bellows into his proper place, which I think of as being a powerful central figure in the early American Twentieth Century, linking the wide spectrum of styles that were growing in the hothouse of New York City throughout the early part of the century, right up to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II.

I started by thinking in terms of Bellows as a touchstone between the Ash Can painters, and their commitment to urban reality, and American Impressionism, which was a late-blooming thing which, pace Bellows' reviewers, hasn't always received enough credit for what it is, as opposed to what it is not. But the deeper you consider Bellows' work, the more links to his contemporaries you can make. Some early paintings, like 42 Kids (1907) recall Eakins, but his figures can also seem like children's book illustrations, almost stick figures. You can see Sloan in Election Night Times Square (1906), and there is no denying affinity with the Ash Can artists, which is no surprise as he studied under Robert Henri, alongside Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent

Bellows' second-best known works are probably his studies around the excavation of the Pennsylvania Station, in which New York City sits atop some primordial force, fires coming from within the earth, with the few human figures looking beaten down, and the lights of the city street pale against the workers' floodlights. This is a different sort of look at urban reality, one which is partly mythic and partly impressionist, recalling Whistler in its use of distinct lighting. You can see some of Hopper in the buildings in the background of Excavation At Night (1908), and you can also see Bellows' influence on later artists like Charles Demuth or Charles Sheeler, who celebrated the finished product of such excavation. It's a different dynamic to the Impressionists; yes, you can see the steam from a train while looking down Riverside Park in Rain On The River (1908) and you can sense the intrusion of the machine age, but Bellows is working at a time when rail is commonplace, and in a milieu where escape from New York is not the grail it was in Paris.

While Cliff Dwellers (1913), with its metaphorical title, can be seen in a genre context, it's a big step forward to New York (1911), a city scene which blends a number of New York squares into one, and populates it with a more fashionable sort of Lowry crowd. There are elements on abstract, say on the wagon pulling itself across the foreground. Way off in the distance, between two skyscrapers and almost crowning a third, is a cold-looking cloud, a kind of gateway to Bellows' most brilliant New York studies—painting after painting of the city frozen by winter, held in thrall to mother nature. His winter is brilliant sun-reflecting white and deep ice blue, and the wild spaces always extend right up to and even past the border of civilisation. It is as if he is returning the city to its proper place in the grand scheme of things, even when, as in Love Of Winter (1914--below left) it's only the sight of the pristine hills glowering in the background. There are elements of Rockwell Kent in some of the painting he did outside the city, in Maine (where Robert Henri summered, and which would be important for artists as diverse as Hopper and John Marin), for example (Forth and Back, 1913) which stands in comparison to Blue Snow, The Battery (1910) to remind us of Bellows' vision of a New York that remained part of unfettered nature. This is obvious in North River (1908), with its high point of view looking past the snow, past the boats on the river, to the seeming wilds of the Palisades.

By contrast, Summer Night Riverside Drive (1909 below right) features lurking darkness and two bits of impressionistic light, including reflections off the river, while figures in the park look for privacy—a topic made plainer, but with less striking effects, in Strugglers Solitude (1913). By the start of World War I, I think you can point to Bellows as already reaching elements of synthesis between the forces in modern painting. The sheer scope of the works I've mentioned were produced in the space of eight years, by which time Bellows was one of New York's leading artists.

But he was also part of a group called The Lyrical Left, and by 1911 was on the board of The Masses. His drawings for the paper, along with other lithographs done for more upscale magazines like Harper's Weekly and Collier's are revealing because they show where Bellows channelled the social awareness we saw in his paintings. This becomes particularly evident after the start of the Great War, in his dramatic drawings in the series Disasters Of War, which deliberately recall Goya, in a magazine illustrayion of the murder of British nurse Edith Cavell, and in his five paintings titled War Scenes, which were inspired by the 1915 Bryce Report on German atrocities. These are pure propaganda, pure emotion, as powerful in their way as his boxing work, but with a broader focus. They reminded me immediately of John Singer Sargent's Gassed, which was completed in 1919 and hangs in the Imperial War Museum. There is a palpable sense of shock in both painters, as if they cannot totally comprehend the full horror of what they are painting.

He was more ironic and cutting but less shocked perhaps in works like Benediction In Georgia, Electrocution, and Dance In A Madhouse, all done in 1916-17, where convicts being preached to or executed don't look saved or blessed, and the mad look anything but. The last looks forward to the work of Jack Levine, in its chaotic beauty. There's an interesting boxing cover Bellows did for the New Masses, and two pages of contrasting illustrations: John Sloan's portrait of the upper crust on an ocean liner on one, Bellows' riverfront scene of meagre food in the other.

His later magazine work, if anything, is more emotionally powerful. His Billy Sunday (1923), a study of the fiery preacher whom he covered with John Reed, shows Sunday with his fist cocked, like a boxer, the press in the front rows like at a boxing match, and the crowd in expressions of fear, shock, and wonder. The Law Is Too Slow (1923) is a lithograph done for Century magazine, a black man being burned beneath a hanging tree by men in masks. In a sense you get the sense of a divide between this work and his painting, because by this time he was concentrating on portraiture, and they are hugely impressive portraits, which again recall Sargent.

Sargent used to paint watercolours for his own experiment and amusement, while concentrating on the portraits which earned him his acclaim and living. Bellows may well have been painting his portraits as much for their sense of safety, in the evident beauty he highlights in his wife and daughters, his main subjects, as for anything else. At the start of the exhibition, you see three of early portraits, done 1907-09. Frankie the Organ Boy stares directly at the viewer with eyes almost bugged out. His Nude Girl: Miss Leslie Hare does suggest Manet, but her face, like Frankie's seems to be making a statement, just slightly off a pose, perhaps indicating their background in the streets. But the portrait of the laundry girl Queenie Burnett (Little Girl In White) is magnificent in its efforts to imbue her with an almost fairy-tale royalty.

He can be as perfect as Sargent or Whistler in his portrait of Mr and Mrs Philip Wise (1924) but there is something almost reverential in Emma And Her Children which contrasts movingly with Emma At The Piano (1914). In the latter, she is part of the balance of lovely objects in an almost neo-impressionist way, while in the later work, the figures are more carefully delineated, with more depth, but set against an almost abstract background.

Finally, there is The Picnic (1924) with its Alice in Wonderland dreamlike quality, with his daughter holding a jump rope and looking off into the Wonderland across the Hudson River, while Bellows contemplates his fishing pole while his wife stares into the picnic blanket. It's hard not to see that as some sort of premonition of his departure from them; a burst appendix would lead to his death from blood poisoning in January 1925.

One gets the distinct impression that at the time of his death, Bellows was possibly reassessing his artistic direction, and given the variety of his earlier work, and the contrast between his illustration and painting in his later, I wonder how significant that abstract background in Emma And Her Children is. Because I see another link here, between Bellows and the Abstract Expressionists. Bellows was the most masculine of painters; like Franz Kline he had been a sports star who turned to painting, and like Kline his work conveys physical dynamism. With America, and American art, in flux in the Roaring Twenties, and about to entire the Depression, Bellows future, looked at retrospectively, almost shimmers with possibility. But what he left behind, as evidenced in this exhibition, is satisfying enough.

George Bellows 1882-1925: Modern American Life

Royal Academy of Art, until 9 June 2013

This essay also appears at Irresistible Targets (http://irresistibletargets.blogspot.com)

STUART DAVIS: RESEEING TEN YEARS LATER

Stuart Davis: Art & Theory
an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York
through 15 December 2002

Stuart Davis: Art and Theory, 1920-31
by Diane Kelder
Pierpont Morgan Library, $7.95 ISBN 0875981380

NOTE: Searching my floppy files today, I stopped to reread this article, which was published in the TLS ten years ago. It brought back a very pleasant memory of the exhibition at the Morgan, which I came across because I liked to use their cloak room as a left luggage facility while passing between the airports and Grand Central Station (whose storage was closed at the time, for security concerns) and also because their cafe was so nice. I hadn't really appreciated Stuart Davis, and this exhibition was one of those excellent ones that shows you something in a way you've never seen it, nor thought about it, before.

One of the effects of the modern art explosion that came from America just after the Second World War has been to overshadow the work of artists who bridge the gap in the tradition between the realists, like Thomas Eakins or John Sloan, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and the abstract expressionists and pop artists from that century’s middle. Stuart Davis was one of the most important of those artists, and Diane Kelder, in her sharply written monograph which accompanied a small but revealing exhibition of his work at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, has taken a large step toward placing Davis firmly in the context of a continuum in modern American art.

Davis was a realist prodigy, not yet 21, when five of his watercolours were displayed in 1913 at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, at the 69th Regiment’s Armory, the famed Armory Show which introduced America to European modern art. He came by his talent naturally. His mother was a sculptor, his father an artist who served as art director of a Philadelphia newspaper, where many of the group of realist painters known as "The Eight" supported themselves doing illustrations.

One of them, John Sloan, later served as art director of the influential socialist magazine, ‘The Masses’; he bought illustrations from the teenaged Davis, who was already in New York studying with the best-known of the group, Robert Henri, whose work led to their being re-named ‘The Ashcan School’. They brought a gritty but vivid new realism to the straining loftiness of American art, a concern with the everyday life of cities, particularly working class pleasures and bohemian life ‘downtown’. They loved the music halls and boxing rings, and the young Davis. a piano player himself, haunted the clubs in the black sections of Newark and Hoboken, seeking out the music which, brought from the south to the urban centres of the north evolved into jazz.
The music makes a interesting parallel for the art, because what Kelder’s penetrating study shows is how Davis, like so many other American artists, whose view of the world was already being changed by the heady enticements of the new modern popular culture, had his idea of art transformed at the Armory show. changed the way they saw art. Kelder shows how Davis absorbed and adapted the influences of European modernism, turning them into something different, unique, and particularly American. In the process of seeking out his own artistic amalgam, Davis in many ways laid the foundation for much of what followed, and in fact might lay claim to being the hidden father of Pop Art.

For Davis, the link with music was particularly clear. At the Armory he was dazzled by the Fauvists’ use of non-realistic colour to make emotional impact, something for which he had been striving in his own work. "It gave me the same kind of excitement I got from the numerical precisions of Negro piano players…and I resolved I would quite definitely have to become a "modern" artist’, he recalled in 1945.

Of all the artists on display at the Armory, Van Gogh remained the biggest influence. In 1919 Davis painted a self-portrait which at once used bright colours, a yellow face with red lips, a shining blue shirt, and a deep red background, to pay hommage to Van Gogh while already hinting at a move to a style more abstract. That was because Davis was also, like his contemporaries, profoundly affected by Cubism, the other shocking highlight of the Armory show. Although the impact for Davis was immediate, in his case the gestation of the style was slow. As early as 1917, in his painting ‘Garage’, Davis was blending a working-class, realist subject with the unreal colours of a Fauvist palette, and experimenting with planes which overlapped. He summered among the fishermen of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and his 1918 work, ‘Multiple Views’ (below right) is just what its title implies, an attempt to paint various scenes of life in that port (including the recurring garage) simultaneously. The mix of styles results in a painting with a curious feel more medieval than modern.

By integrating objects into planes, Davis was able to create a vibrant sort of cubism, and the nature of the objects he chose, beyond his self-portrait, with echoes of his populist realism, let him indulge that Fauvist palette that had so excited him. Bottles of Odol mouthwash, Lucky Strike cigarette packs, Bull Durham tobacco and Zig-Zag papers, even the literary magazine The Dial feature in his paintings, deconstructed decades before deconstruction. The interaction with poetry was particularly strong, especially the influence of William Carlos Williams. It's instructive to compare Williams' influence on Davis with, say, his effect on Charles Demuth, whose work shares similar concerns with integrating the planes of cubism into realistic settings, but in Demuth's case becomes refined into powerful and bleak industrial landscapes.

Williams used a Davis painting for the frontspiece of ‘Kora In Hell’ and found in Davis’ work the suggestion ‘of development of word against word, without any impediments of story, poetic beauty, or anything at all except word clash and sequence’. Words formed the basis of a mural Davis painted for Gar Sparks’ Nut Shop, an infamous Newark bar.

Davis’ own cubist experiments became refined in the ‘Egg Beater’ series of 1927-28 (below right) Here he nailed an electric fan, rubber glove, and egg beater to a table, and produced an extraordinary sequence of works dealing with the shapes and spatial relationships of the objects. In an early watercolour collage, Davis had added the letters ITLKSEZ: ‘it looks easy’…but the final part of Kelder’s study reveals that his artistic growth was anything but. Throughout his life, Davis kept notebooks, into which he entered, alongside sketches and experiments, his own thoughts on artistic theory and practice. Seeing the pages on exhibition, or reading them in Kelder’s study, one is struck with the single-minded aggression with which Davis pursued modernism, was entranced with the possibilities of a new way of seeing, and a better way of transforming that sight into art. Kelder has done a service not just to Davis, but to an entire era in American art by showing how this was done.

Note: This essay also appears at Irresistible Targets, my primary blog...