George Bellows. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

   

There once was an artist named Bellows who died very young poor fellow. Bellows who died at the young age of 42 from a ruptured appendix is now the subject of a large leisurely paced and nicely installed retrospective at the Met and has enough marvelous paintings in it, to make it worth a look for anyone interested in American painting at the beginning of the 20^th Century. Granted for me the most wonderful works are in the early galleries where Bellows taking the advice of his teacher Robert Henri painted scenes of everyday life in Manhattan. Some of these were rowdy and kinetic with a lush and expressionistic handling of his paint. His boxing paintings from this period are probably his most famous and best known works presenting the viewer with violent images of fighters going at each other while scary looking aficionados of the sport look on. These works are still an influence today, just take a look at the poster for the recent revival of “Golden Boy”. Also strong are his early portraits of everyday people and his portrait of Paddy Flannigan a street kid bearing his chest and buck teeth is superb, moving  and memorable. Also terrific are his large canvases of street kids many of them swimming nude in the murky waters of the East River and his street scenes especially “Cave Dwellers” that was painted almost 100 years ago, and is teeming with color and crowded city life. Bellows was part of the Ashcan school whose work was shocking in its day because of the raw look at New York City life that the artists showed, yet his work was also accepted and rewarded. I must admit that the later galleries which include many bucolic landscapes and stiff and stilted portraits of family and friends didn’t impress me all that much There is also a gallery devoted to large paintings that he did in response to the rumors about German atrocities to the people of Belgium in World War I that work more as propaganda than as singular works of art. The exhibition ends with his last boxing painting the wonderful Dempsey and Firpo that has always been a favorite of mine and it marked a change in his painting style with the promise of great things to come.