George Bellows: Modern American Life, Royal Academy - exhibition review

A show dedicated to early 20th-century American artist George Bellows is a reminder that his prizefighter paintings are a knockout. If only he hadn’t thrown in the towel later in life
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21 March 2013

George Bellows (1882-1925) is an American painter familiar from recent exhibitions, among them one at the National Gallery two years ago introducing the Ashcan School of urban realism, a group who deserted newspaper illustration for high art, for whom New York’s Bowery district was a prime source of subjects — street urchins, immigrants, prostitutes, athletes, prize fighters and boxers — leaving a vivid record of the city’s pullulating life a century ago.

Now, at the Royal Academy, we have an exhibition devoted to Bellows standing alone as the all-American painter-man who played baseball and basketball for his university and withdrew from academe without a degree, to play as a semi-professional and, at 22, become an art student in New York in 1904. He remained a student of sorts until 1909 but had by then received many “mentions” and exhibited so often that he had for some years been a fully professional artist. The wonderfully evocative River Rats was executed in 1906, only two years into his tutelage, Forty-two Kids (his homage to Eakins) and Club Night (the first of his boxing canvases) in 1907, and 1909 was the year of Stag at Sharkey’s.

Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of the Club are the paintings that thrust Bellows into the limelight. They are depictions of prize fights moments before the knockout blow, in which the bruised face and flesh are bloodied, knees sag with exhaustion, and an audience of morons as hideous and degraded as any in Goya’s imagination lusts for more; even Bellows’ energetically jabbing, stabbing brushstrokes join the fray, as fast-moving as the fight itself. Only for two years were boxers his prime subjects, until in 1924 he tried again, with Dempsey and Firpo — and what a falling-off there was. Influenced by theorists, particularly by Jay Hambidge, the John the Baptist of Dynamic Symmetry (how could so sane a man be so seduced by such a crank?), whose lectures he heard in 1917, and convinced that this will-o’-the-wisp was of greater value than any study of anatomy, realism or naturalism, gone were the slashing brushstrokes that construct the limbs and trunks, gone the complex intertwining of bodies, gone the compelling violence of blows about to be struck, gone the brilliant and horrifying inventions of the crowd. All are replaced by a waxwork tableau of smoothly contoured flesh carefully arranged in a pictorial diagonal, the referee uncomfortably irrelevant, the foreground spectators generalised caricatures. It is as though Bellows’ imagination was fatigued; he had never painted these bouts on the spot but witnessed the fights and then, from memory, not drawings, evoked a single moment with gestures and attitudes informed by what he had observed — “I don’t know,” he said, “anything about boxing: I’m just painting two men trying to kill each other,” but in this late painting the killer instinct and the killing are no longer there. This is Jack Vettriano stuff.

Bellows was at his best when young, when at school and constantly in the presence of other painters of kindred spirit. His River Rats, most of which is a cliff of brushstrokes free and fast, thinly loaded and transparent, separating the very edge of the slum city from the naked urchins who play on the narrow shore of the East River below, is a thing of astonishing beauty and invention, pure tone, pure paint, conjuring a summer day in the crowded city where a swimming hole (surviving into the 1960s) offers some relief in the humid heat. The fragility of tiny figures that are little more than shrewd ticks with the loaded brush are in sharp contrast with the great crumbling bluff of the embankment; thus is Magnasco revived in the 20th century. Forty-two Kids, a year later, is a deliberate development from it, based on many preparatory drawings of nude boys skilfully woven into a composition that at first sight seems random but is exquisitely contrived to control the examining eye — why should the painter of this perfection ever have felt that he needed the guidance of Dynamic Symmetry?

Bellows’s other New York canvases — excavations for great buildings, the docks, crowd scenes, landscapes of the Battery and the city’s rivers — hold the fort, as it were, at a far lower aesthetic level, short of genius but not of competence. The paint is still thick, the brushwork painterly and there are hints of his political sensibility but these are not great paintings.

As he moved into the teens of the 20th century, his work lost its heroic identity as his and became much the same as that of a host of other painters of ordinary rank in England, Scotland, France and even Canada. By 1920 he was an unremarkable painter of fashionable idleness. During the First World War (in which he did not fight), he was the enthusiastic victim of mendacious anti-German propaganda, painting, as history, atrocities for which there was no evidence. Did he enjoy these sadistic inventions? Had he enjoyed the boxing bouts? Was there some disturbingly dark element in his nature? The war over, he lapsed into ideal hallucinatory rubbish scarcely distinguishable from the decorative fantasies of Doris and Anna Zinkeisen, his popular but now deservedly forgotten younger contemporaries in England, and into histrionic derivations from old masters with a 20th-century twist.

This exhibition is unlikely to convince an informed London audience that Bellows was a great painter. Significant paintings, though illustrated in the catalogue, are absent, River Rats and Members of the Club particularly foolish omissions, making way for too many pedestrian portraits with eyes as big, black and expressionless as prunes, and a whole room is surrendered to his monochrome prints, largely later lithographic reworkings of his paintings for cheap commercial purposes. The Royal Academy has it that “George Bellows died too young”. Sudden death did indeed cut him short at 42 (ruptured appendix-surgery-peritonitis), just not quite soon enough to preserve, unblemished, his heroic reputation.

George Bellows: Modern American Life is at the Royal Academy, W1 (020 7300 8000, royalacademy.org.uk) until June 9. Open Sun-Thurs, 10am-6pm; Fri, 10am-10pm. Admission £10 (concs available).

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