Art: George & Arthur

Modern painting is less than 30 years old in the U. S. It has already produced a slim collection of artists whose eminence no intelligent critic in 1936 would dream of challenging. Manhattan’s 57th Street, commercial centre of the U. S. art world, last week decorously hailed the opening of the Season with memorial exhibitions of the work of two of these recently canonized masters. At the Kleemann and Keppel Galleries respectively appeared the works of the late Arthur Bowen Davies, the late George Wesley Bellows.

Beyond the fact that they were contemporaries, casual friends, great draughtsmen and constant battlers for the recognition of U. S. Art, Artists Davies and Bellows had little in common. Supersensitive, romantic Arthur Davies, painter of moonstruck nudes in mystic landscapes, was so shy that he spent most of his life hiding behind a bushy mustache and the tallest and tightest stiff collar haberdashers could furnish. He would stay locked in his studio painting furiously for days at a time, occasionally lunched frugally with his good friend Dealer William Macbeth. Only his burning interest in the technique of painting and the encouragement of young talent pulled him sufficiently out of himself to argue rich Miss Lizzie Bliss, richer Mrs. John D. Rockefeller into becoming collectors and patrons of modern art, made him a hard working organizer of the historic Armory Show of 1913 that brought the French moderns to the attention of the U. S. public.

Convivial George Wesley Bellows, producer of some of the greatest prize fight pictures ever painted or lithographed in the U. S., was clean-shaven, bald, dressed like a truckdriver. In his three years at Ohio State he was shortstop on the baseball team. His capacity for beer was exceeded only by that of his good crony, lusty George links. Never did a public argument arise—the shooting of Edith Cavell, lynching in the South, the hypocrisy of the Billy Sunday school of revivalists — but vivid George Bellows felt impelled to get himself and his trenchant pencil into it.

A mystical Welshman, Arthur Davies was so stirred by every form of artistic technique that his widow found works in 20 different media: paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, wood & ivory carvings, tapestry, rugs, stained glass, terra cotta and colored enamels. The only technical idiosyncrasy of George Bellows was a fondness for the cheap board on which the U. S. Government prints penny postcards. For his lithographs and drawings he used to buy reams of it, uncut, from Washington.

The Bellows exhibition last week consisted entirely of drawings for some of his best known prints. Headliner was the Daumier-like drawing for his famed Dance in a Madhouse. In the market, Septuagenarian Charles H. Worcester, retired Chicago lumber tycoon & art patron, snapped it up on the opening day for $1,500, planned to give it to the Art Institute of Chicago some day. The Davies show was entirely of paintings, included such favorites as the ethereal Madonna of the Hills and the blonde Southampton Venus. Here, too, the prices were remarkably reasonable. Highest price in the show was $3,000 for an Italian landscape. Several sound Davies paintings were under the $300 mark and in the Bellows exhibition there were some absolutely first-rate drawings for as little as $50. To shrewd collectors, the work of such men at such prices was as obvious a bargain as General Motors at $10 per share.