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George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925)

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George Wesley Bellows (1882–1925) GEORGE WESLEY BELLOWS (1882–1925) Portrait of Elizabeth Alexander Oil on canvas, 53 x 43 in. Signed and inscribed (at lower right): Geo Bellows; (on the back, prior to lining): Portrait Elizabeth Alexander / Geo. Bellows / 146 E. 19 St. / NY Painted in September 1924 RECORDED: George Bellows, “Record Book C,” (unpub. ms., copy on deposit, H. V. Allison Galleries, New York, Sept. 1916), p. 19 // “Last Canvases by Bellows on View,” The Art News XXIII, no. 18 (February 7, 1925), p. 3 // “The Democracy of Bellows,” Boston Evening Transcript, March 11, 1925, p. 28 // Charles H. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (1965), p. 291 // Journal of the American Medical Association CCXLVII, no. 24 (June 25, 1982), illus. in color on cover // American Paintings VI, exhib. cat. (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1990), pp. 144–45 illus. in color // Valerie Ann Leeds et al., Spanish Sojourns: Robert Henri and the Spirit of Spain, exhib. cat. (Savannah, Georgia: Telfair Museums, 2013), pp. 63 fig. 46 illus. in color 2 EXHIBITED: Art Institute of Chicago, 1924–25, A Special Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows, Leon Kroll, Eugene Savage, Walter Ufer, Paul Bartlett, Edgar Cameron, H. Amiard Oberteuffer, George Oberteuffer, no. 22 // Durand-Ruel Gallery, New York, 1925, Paintings by George Bellows, no. 6 // Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, 1925, Paintings by George Bellows, no. 4, as “Elizabeth” // Boston Art Club, 1925, Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows, Charles Hopkinson, and Eugene Speicher, no. 6, as “Elizabeth” // Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 1925, Exhibition of Paintings by George Bellows, Charles Hopkinson, and Robert Henri, no. 11, as “Elizabeth” // Kennedy Galleries, New York, 1985, Summits: Outstanding American Paintings, no. 13 // Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, 1993–94, George Bellows // Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts, 2006, George Bellows: A Ringside Seat, n.p. illus. in color EX COLL.: the artist, 1924–25; to estate of the artist, 1925; to his wife, Emma S. Bellows; to [H. V. Allison & Co., New York]; Dr. John E. Larkin, 1980; to sale, Sotheby’s, New York, November 30, 1989, no. 235; to [Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, 1989–94]; to private collection, until 2001; [Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York]; to private collection, until the present George Bellows was one of the leading American exponents of realist painting during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and, like many of his fellow artists, he often drew on contemporary life as the subject matter for his paintings and lithographs. Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, Bellows attended Ohio State University for three years, then moved to New York City in 1904 to enroll at William Merritt Chase’s New York School of Art. There he studied under Robert Henri, a successful portrait and figure painter, legendary teacher, and a champion against traditional forces in art. 3 Bellows flourished under Henri’s tutelage. Although he initially produced works in the dark-toned manner of the early Ashcan School idiom, he quickly developed a powerful, muscular style of his own. When Stag at Sharkey’s (1909, Cleveland Museum of Art), Bellows’s vigorously painted, ultra- masculine boxing picture, was first exhibited in April 1910, Bellows vaulted into the forefront of American realist painting. Surely one of the greatest pictures in American art, Stag at Sharkey’s imprinted upon Bellows a deserved reputation for painting bold, serious works full of vitality that was to last until his untimely death in 1925. Bellows’s works are characterized by a strong compositional order and harmonious color arrangements. One of the greatest critical thinkers in American art, Bellows experimented with several theoretical painting methods over the years, exchanging ideas and strategies with Henri and others of the Ashcan school. Eternally restless, Bellows often devoted himself to new color and formal theories, only to suddenly change direction, sometimes retaining certain elements but often discarding ideas entirely from his working process. Consequently, Bellows’s oeuvre has distinct, if short, periods, each of which reflect a different facet of the artist’s interests at the time. Although Bellows was closely identified with Henri and his anti-establishment group, he was elected an Associate of the conservative National Academy of Design, the youngest artist so honored, and was made an Academician in 1913. He exhibited at the National Academy between 1907 and 1918, and was the recipient of many prizes and medals. Among the other exhibitions in which Bellows participated, winning many awards along the way, were the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, from 1907 to 1925; the Art Institute of Chicago, from 1908 to 1924; the Corcoran Biennials, Washington, D. C., from 1910 to 1923; and the Contemporary American Artists (later, the Society of Independent Artists), 4 New York, from 1908 to 1925. As a member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors he helped to organize the Armory Show of 1913, where he exhibited nine works of his own. Bellows’s varied interests led him to explore different genres as his mood suited him, but portraiture was one constant throughout his career. (The most thorough treatment of Bellows’s portraits is Jane Myers, “‘The Most Searching Place in the World’: Bellows and Portraiture,” in Michael Quick, et. al., The Paintings of George Bellows, exhib. cat. [Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum of Art, 1992], pp. 171–238.) And while his experimentation with contemporary art theories would seem to mark him as a modernist, Bellows understood his work as the extension of three American masters of the preceding generation: Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and James MacNeill Whistler. This becomes evident when looking at Bellows’s portraits, which combine the frank, psychologically penetrating characteristics of Eakins’s portraits with color harmonies adapted from Whistler’s. Bellows also often used poses reminiscent of the works of the American master portraitists, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, and Bellows’s mentor, Henri. Bellows used portraiture as a vehicle for artistic exploration. He found the demands of portrait commissions to be frustrating, and once he was firmly established as a successful artist, he limited his portraits to friends or family, making these mature works among the most intimate of his entire oeuvre. Elizabeth Alexander and her husband, Norbert Heermann, an artist and critic, were Bellows’s neighbors in Woodstock, New York, where Bellows spent his summers. Bellows painted this portrait in September 1924 in preparation for solo exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York the following year. Bellows sensed that the Durand-Ruel exhibition would be important for his career, writing that the gallery “held such a high standard of quality in the pictures they have shown, and since practically no American 5 has ever been included in their gallery, this exhibition may have added a significance which I am very glad to accept” (Bellows, letter to Frank Crowninshield, December 15, 1924, Bellows Papers, Amherst College Library, as quoted in ibid., p. 238). Bellows spent the summer painting a number of ambitious, monumental figure paintings, including the present portrait. In them, he seems to have departed from his earlier portrait style, following what was surely another characteristically abrupt change in his style’s trajectory. As Jane Myers has noted, in these works, Bellows “departed further from a naturalistic viewpoint, using bright colors in expressive and independent fashion and giving a predominant role to unusual patterned textures that earlier had been confined to accents” (ibid., p. 227). Surely the present picture supports Myers’s assertion. In this highly decorative, brilliantly colored portrait in the gold- papered drawing room of Bellows’s house in Woodstock, Elizabeth Alexander is seated on a Victorian horsehair-upholstered sofa (diminutive in reality but scaled up by the artist for grand pictorial effect) holding a garish, blue-green feather, and dressed in a showy black lace dress and mantilla. Perhaps Bellows here is satirizing the several Spanish portrait painters then in vogue in America, such as Ignacio Zuloaga, for whom Bellows had few nice words. According to his wife, Emma Bellows: George did not like portrait commissions and when after a large dinner in New York given in honor of some former artist who had been quite patronizing of American art—the foreign artist (as he was putting on his overcoat) turned to George and said—“You Americans do not go in for portrait painting do you Bellows” George said “No. We import most of our labor” (Emma Bellows, speaking to Homer Saint-Gaudens, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, curatorial files, as quoted in ibid., p. 229). Bellows’s premonition that the Durand-Ruel show would have a great significance in his career did come true, although in a most tragic and unexpected way. In January 1925, one month before the show was to open, Bellows died suddenly from acute appendicitis. His last paintings seem to indicate that he was looking to art history for new sources of inspiration. Perhaps his most beguiling of his late works, Two 6 Women (1924, Portland Museum of Art, Maine; see ibid., p. 228 fig 55 illus. in color) is a visual quote of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love; perhaps the present work makes a similar conceit to the colorful portraits of Spanish women by Francisco Goya. Bellows left no explanations about these late works, so we are left to speculate as to what it was that he was trying to convey. Regardless, in works such as Portrait of Elizabeth Alexander, we see Bellows’s full powers in the handling of color and paint, and in creating portraits of intense power and expression. This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Bellows’s work currently in preparation by Glenn C.
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