Art: Bellows Book

The Man. In 1882 George Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio. In 1903 he was a lanky, nervous boy who played right forward on the basketball five and shortstop on the baseball nine at Ohio State University. Even after he came to Manhattan to be a painter, he often paid for dinner or theatre seats by playing professional ball over the weekends. He was interested in looking at people and at things so that he could make pictures of them. For 20 years he made pictures, mostly of people doing things very intently. Then, in 1925, he died.

By that time he had achieved an enormous reputation among critics & connoisseurs. His lithographs,* especially those of prizefighters and evangelists, had been greatly praised when hung in galleries or reproduced in magazines. Now 195 of them have been collected and published in a book.â€

The Pictures. In the crowded gloom of Dance in a Madhouse, lunatics jostle. An old man with a bald head and a long, sharp nose grins and capers, holding a woman in white whose face is twisted into a grotesque horror of mirth. Around them the mad people sprawl, each one tasting some sly, thoughtful obscenity, and a man whose hand is a pointed nightmare gapes at a tiny woman.

Sixteen East Gay Street is a picture of a street in Columbus, Ohio. Several people are walking along the sidewalk and a pair of children are fixing a tricycle. In the space between the two houses across the street the sky slants a light on the asphalt, and makes the leaves of the trees as bright as coins. It is late afternoon; in the golden twilight everything seems very quiet. If you look at the picture long enough, the man sitting on the porch will fold up his paper and go in to have supper.

Benediction in Georgia is a dark room in a prison. Near a table at the left a man in a frock coat is standing with his arms stretched out toward convicts who are sitting along benches. There are faces of anger, or despair, or ennui, or terror. A Negro looks at the floor hard, as if he were trying to remember something that made him sad. He is wearing a chain around his leg.

The Shower Bath is full of a lot of naked businessmen who have just been trying to exercise. A scrawny little man is standing by the pool snickering at a brawny tub-of-guts who looks like Bully Boy Brewster. A bony oaf on the springboard is telling a dirty joke to a bald-headed codger with a pot belly. Goggle-eyed boosters paddle about in the pool or rub their misshapen haunches with towels. Near the showers is a scales for them to weight themselves on.

The old lady in Study of My Mother is sitting in an armchair by a window through whose heavy curtains only enough light soaks to touch the hands that lean against her steep lap. Her severe face makes her thought a secret. Maybe she is thinking about God, maybe she is wondering what time it is. But her eyes are looking at something through the dark room beyond its darkness.

There is a series of War pictures, a prizefight series (including the Stag at Sharkey’s, Dempsey & Firpo) a series of illustrations, many portraits.

The Significance. Captious critics have called George Bellows an illustrator rather than an artist. This is because the most important qualities in his work are a sense of the dramatic and an ability to make the movement of his figures so intense that it is almost impossible to realize that they are, actually, stationary. Like all other artists, he is an illustrator of life; like no other artist he has found the themes for his illustrations in the strident banalities of U.S. civilization. Perhaps the only important U. S. artist who never crossed the geographical boundary of his country, he advanced its esthetic frontiers by producing art, which, as well as being indigenous, is both comprehensive and comprehensible, original without being evasive, and humble without ever for a moment becoming humdrum.

The Book should please intelligent people who hitherto have been able to find the work of George Bellows extensively displayed only in galleries. It contains a preface by Thomas Beer; is three-quarters of an inch thick, twelve inches wide, fourteen inches long.

*Drawings made with soap crayon on stone. Water applied adheres to the parts not drawn upon, after which ink adheres to the parts unwatered so that the drawing can be printed.

†GEORGE BELLOWS, HIS LITHOGRAPHS — Knopf ($15).