George Wesley Bellows

After writing about Robert Henri the founder of the Ashcan School, it seems appropriate to continue on with George Wesley Bellows his most acclaimed student.

Initially, Bellows was an illustrator and upon his coming to New York City he sought to make a go at painting in hopes of a career, which eventually he attained.  These paintings of Bellows are socially conscious in their depiction of the working class conditions as well as the dingy atmosphere of New York in the early part of the twentieth century.

There is something to be said of Bellows bravura approach to painting, directly going at the canvas so as to capture the energy of his subject in a responsive manner.  It is an approach which has spontaneity and lends itself to intuition.  There is also a resultant freshness that is stimulating for its boldness and fluidity.  When you look at a Bellows painting you can retrace the steps in the swoop of a leg or smudge of a face, there is no attempt to hide work.  When a painter like Bellows takes up direct painting it creates challenges that are intrinsic to an individual work.  A weak area in a painting for example, may call for bold line work or intense color and it takes a capable artist to respond accordingly with an appropriate solution.  This approach gets at the fundamentals of painting and forces the artist to learn a wide range of skills so as to develop that artistic intuition.

Street scenes, and boxing matches were of course not the norm in Bellows’s time, so they carry a historical significance that was relevant to the society he lived in.  Like Henri, it was as simple as painting what was true in everyday life.  It is hard to imagine a time when painting was actually the subject of controversy.  Now in a society where “anything goes”, painters tend to retreat to the recesses of their own imaginations and personal experiences rather than capitulate their times.  It is a time where painting has lost much of its social significance and artists have to look within to find their motivation.  Looking at a Bellows painting can be romantic because it is honest and simple.  Painting can easily become convoluted with ideas, it is refreshing to see paintings that show off the medium expressively while remaining accessible with their subjects.