The truth about George Bellows…Not

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Julian Freeman reflects on the tiny portion of this most versatile artist’s work now on show in London

Walk onto London’s Victoria Underground station and be confronted by two gigantic prizefighters, the central motif of George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s. The Royal Academy’s advertising of the first ever exhibition of Bellows’ work in Britain is certainly inescapable; for those interested in the ‘Ash-Can’ School it is essential viewing, but leave your preconceived notions at the door. For the most part ‘GeorgeBellows’ is immensely rewarding.

The downside to this? There is more work than the space can easily cope with, and the RA’s Sackler Galleries cannot contain the physical and intellectual forces at play here, for the devil really is in the detail. As a study of the expansive and well-illustrated catalogue will show, the London exhibition is a pared-down version of a larger retrospective, the last stand of a three-stage tour that has already spent time in Washington (National Gallery), and New York (Metropolitan Museum). There is more. Following its arrival and opening in New York last year, Roberta Smith reviewed the exhibition for the New York Times, describing it as an ‘…unnecessarily disappointing retrospective’, claiming even then that it was not fully representative of the entirety of Bellows’ oeuvre.

The point is a moot one for visitors to the RA. For many Americans, Bellows (1882–1925) is akin to a National Treasure. They know him well. Even so, The Met’s last Bellows retrospective was just over 50 years ago and there has never been a solo exhibition of his work anywhere in the UK. So for Britons, most of whose awareness of his work is likely to be limited, his Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) is one almighty signature picture, and now it’s in London. In her New York Times review, Smith directed readers to the Bellows catalogue raisonée, easily available online, and in particular to his paintings of the Maine coast from 1911, which barely register in this exhibition. They affirm the existence of another Bellows, introduced but not extensively developed in the exhibition catalogue.

It is worth questioning the overall representation of Bellows’ output as offered at the Academy; worth asking seriously whether newer British viewers should be presented with a clearer examination of the artist, within an exhibition offered up as a defining statement, for Bellows’ paintings of the Hudson, the Palisades and the East River are so technically compelling in their modernism, impressionism, in their startling rendering of atmosphere and in their expressivity, that they might easily eclipse his fighters. Landscapes. Not cityscapes. North River (1908), Rain on the River (1908), Winter Afternoon (1909) and The Palisades (1909) are terrific: they are painters’ paintings, and they might be more than this, for they replace Bellows-the-illustrator with a glimpse of Bellows-the-formidable-Northern-painter. Buy into this notion, and at this point in his career he becomes not only the equal of his American contemporaries, but of some in the Nordic countries also. It doesn’t take anything away from Bellows-the-recorder-of-metropolitan-life. It just shifts the axis a little.

Such conjecture serves to show how fruitless will be most attempts to cross-reference the artistic evolution of Bellows-at-the-RA with epochal artistic events in Britain or Europe, not least because he never remained still for long enough. Viewers seeking some assonance with the frenetic work of Bellows’ early career will find it mostly in the metropolis-as-subject, and here his powerful boxing subjects, their staging and lighting, their supporting drawings and lithographs, and a range of admirable street scenes prove compelling counterpoints to a variety of American and European work from the same era.

British art-lovers ignorant of Bellows might make interesting comparisons with the work of Frank Brangwyn or even Arthur Melville, or with John Lavery’s oils of 1910–20. They might also remember (uselessly) that Bellows was born in the same year as Percy Wyndham Lewis, or stand before Bellows’ frankly astonishing 1909 trio of paintings charting the construction of Pennsylvania Station and fast-forward to Frank Auerbach’s Oxford Street Building Site paintings of 1959–60.  In reality, Auerbach’s subject was far smaller; in the texture of paint it is rendered as intensely. Similar moments abound in this collection: recourse to ‘virtual’ art history, and its ‘what-ifs’ can sometimes be attractive. Don’t go there. From within any artistic tradition it is easy enough to fix historical moments with more-or-less convenient labels.

If anything is clear from the exhibition catalogue, it is that since Bellows’ untimely death, considerable art historical expertise and intense debate has been brought to bear in the USA to evaluate his life, art and ideas. Further, for all the claims made for his work, and for the influence of his teacher and mentor Robert Henri (1865–1929), neither this exhibition or its catalogue fully investigate the roots of Bellows’ understanding of European modernism as it evolved after the 1850s. It seems fair on this evidence to suggest that, in common with more than a few contemporaries in the USA and Britain, Bellows was unable to fully engage with primary European source material and so derived much of his contextual visual education through works available in collections, and, just as likely, from reproductions.

This is to chase one’s own tail, for here is ‘George Bellows’, and it quickly becomes clear that Bellows on his own is not ‘Ash Can’ any more than Sickert is ‘Camden Town’. He is Bellows, and to view this collection is to understand that he remains as independent as they come, a state promoted forcefully in Charles Brock’s introductory catalogue essay. ‘Independent’ does this man no justice, for this is an exhibition brimful of captivating pleasures, contrasts and anomalies, with more than a few residual, demanding dialogues, and a wealth of unfinished business.