Royal
Academy, London
The
latest in a long series of behind-time art exhibition reviews, in
both senses of that word. It is, if any recompense, part of a short series on
Modernist art and the city
”Here
is a slice of New York... It is not pretty... When you paint a
crab-apple don't paint us a luscious peach”
-
New York Sun review of Bellows, 1909
George
Bellows was part of the Ashcan School, a loose association of early Twentieth century
American artists, who chose to paint contemporary subjects in an
immediate style. Robert Hughes has said of them that they “wanted
paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that
froze on Broadway in the winter”. Indeed, his career essentially
began with his move to New York City in 1904.
Street-Level
Views
The
immediacy begins pretty much immediately. For the first room is given
over to his ink and charcoal drawings, and its notable how when his
oils show up how little they depart from these. Its not just that
they display the same roughness and vibrancy, they even retain the
limited and quite sombre palettes.
For
example, 'Forty-two Kids' (1907, above) is made up
of shades of brown and blue-green, the frame divided in diagonal
halves between these two dominant colours. The children's flesh is
neither healthily tanned nor cleanly white, but somewhat sickly
shades of orangey brown. The nudity, the array of both lolling and
frolicking figures, these suggest at some bucolic nature scene. But
this palette and the broken-up jetty on which they hang out quite
deliberately vie with this, and make it clear this is not just an
urban but a downtown scene. While the word “kids” in the title
might seem innocuous to us, the vernacular term would have told a
contemporary audience these were the poor children of newly arrived
immigrants. Children swim in the public pool because they have a
nickel. Kids made do with this.
At
five feet across, 'New York' (1911, up top) is
undertaken with a truly American sense of scale. Even today, to those
of us who passed through the bustle of central London to get to the
gallery, it's strikingly metropolitan. There's a quite rigid dividing
line across the middle of the picture, skyscrapers above separated
from the teeming figures below. The upper section is almost
vertiginous, the sweeping buildings not just ascending but the street
receding into the distance. While the lower section is almost
claustrophobic, a cacophony of horizontal motion, with not one of the
many figures looking up to the sights above them. That should be a
street interchange in the middle distance, but instead of a neat
switching mechanism its a convulsive jumble. We thereby see uptown
and downtown in one cross section, just as horse-pulled carts coexist
with buses.
Writing
in the Independent, Michael Glover has described this work as...
”...a
kettle forever on the boil... almost everything is aggressively
man-made, a great interlocking of forces at war with each other... it
is hard to look at any part of this painting because you see it all
at once in all its razzmatazz, splashily impressionistic vigour, a
cityscape that presses back at you, the rush and the clamour of it
all, the seethe of humanity, that sense of being trapped, pent on a
small and relatively narrow island where the only direction the
buildings can go is up, and then up.”
This
time it's not just an image of Lower East Side residents, top-hatted
toffs co-exist with broom-pushing workmen on the street. But it's
from the perspective of the poor blocks. The towering buildings seem
canyons to the lowly footsore immigrants, as much as Monument Valley
did to the pioneers of John Ford films. Though he didn't come from
this bottom-rung background, it's probably important that Bellows
wasn't a native New Yorker. He had to see those soaring skyscrapers
and teeming streets with an outsider's eye, the better to convey them
to the rest of us.
And
the style and execution is as important as the imagery. The Ashcan
School tended to progressive politics (Bellows himself largely moving
in anarchist and libertarian-left circles). And in many ways we see
the almost journalistic style we most associate with politically
committed art – this is like reportage, someone setting down what
they see. But the roughness of execution and impassioned thickness of
the paint draws attention to its existence as a
painting, leading to a creative tension.
It's
not a perspective from any real place, it's an assemblage Bellows has
put together to convey his point. As with 'Forty-two
Kids' there's no intra-picture explanation for the vantage
point. We're too high to be on the street among those hurried
figures, in fact we feel slightly removed from them. Yet there's no
suggestion of a window, or any location which would allow us to look
down. In the language of art, that's often shorthand for seeing
things from the perspective of the artist.
Though
Bellows painted New York in different seasons he perhaps most
excelled at winter scenes, to the point where he could have been
crowned King of Cold. 'Men of the Docks' (1912,
above) powerfully evokes the sense of air that bites - its
skyscrapers blurring into the sky by the frozen equivalent of a heat
haze, the slash of an icy blue river before them. It somehow looks
vivid and muted at the same time, as if the cold has leeched the
colour from it. The huddled figures are just distant enough that
their features start to emerge but never quite resolve, pitched
between ciphered representations of the working man and actual
subjects. One steps away from the others to take a slash out in the
open.
Why
the fixation with weather? Of course, as an island, New York's
weather does tend to extremes so Bellows was simply painting what was
there. But there's more. Take this quote from Upton Sinclair's 1906
Chicago-set novel 'The Jungle':
”...each
season had its trials, as they found. In the spring there were cold
rains, that turned the streets into canals and bogs; the mud would be
so deep that wagons would sink up to the hubs, so that half a dozen
horses could not move them. Then, of course, it was impossible for
any one to get to work with dry feet; and this was bad for men that
were poorly clad and shod, and still worse for women and children.
Later came midsummer, with the stifling heat... a very purgatory; one
time, in a single day, three men fell dead from sunstroke... with the
sun beating down, and the air motionless, the stench was enough to
knock a man over...”
Both
share the conceit that so harsh is city life that the very weather
becomes exacerbated.
In
a rapidly changing city, Bellows often painted scenes of
construction, such as 'The Lone Tenement' (1909)
or 'Pennsylvania Station Excavation' (1909, above). These
tend to evoke the same sense of the industrial sublime as Turner before him, the built environment seen with the same sense of stupefied awe as
nature. Unlike Turner there is an element of
critique of the industrial in Bellows' work. With it's monumental
gothic towers, it's plumes of fire and smoke and its dwarfed figures this
scene has been described as “infernal”. And yet if its
not fully celebrated its presented as an unstoppable transforming
force.
The
historian Henry Adams said of this time:“Power seemed to
have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The
cylinder has exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steel
against the sky.”(Quoted in Jackson Lears' 'New York Knock
Out', Royal Academy magazine 118, alas not currently
available on-line.)
Pugilistic
Painting
And
this mention of power takes us to 'Stag At Sharkeys'
(1908), perhaps the most famous of Bellow's work. It can be best
understood by comparing it to the earlier and more conventional
'Club Night' (1907, both above). In 'Stag'
the figures are more grotesquely distorted in what the show describes
as “vigorous and slashing brushwork”, faces anonymised and only
partly visible. They look to be morphing together even as they fight
against one another. We're placed as if within the audience,
semi-silhouetted heads bobbing up before us. The fighters are then
lit as though they are the light source, an
explosion of action at the centre of the frame. There's pre-echoes of Francis Bacon's morphing, fractious forms.
Boxing
was then officially banned in New York, permitted only in private
clubs. Like prohibition later, part of the attraction became the
illicit, and toffs would thrill to rub shoulders with the common
folk. The ruddy face at the right fighter's foot looks noticeably
urbane rather than urban. (Doubtless at least some of Bellow's fans
would have gained a similar frisson from seeing this work.) Unlike
all the previous examples this is an interior. And yet it still seems
to stand for the city, the war of each against all, a perpetual
struggle with no possible victor.
The
cartoonist Art Speigelman coined the tongue-in-cheek expression
“two-fisted painters” and, with pun intended, this seems an ideal
description of Bellows. There's something insistently masculine in
his art, evident in every picture cited already, which is merely
brought further to the fore by this bruising image. While nature can
be gendered as female, even when its not being 'soft' or nurturing,
the rough edges of the city are always made male. But Bellows is not
just depicting the man-made, his art looks
man-made - not just like it has come from a man but from someone who
stridently (if mot necessarily consciously) identifies as male.
There's an exulting in roughness, which may make this the perfect
subject matter.
The
result is an almost archetypically American paradox at the heart of
Bellows' art - he is exposing the harshness of New York life for the
poor, while simultaneously revelling in the strength of those who can
withstand that harshness. Bellows and New York are
the boxers, forever caught in that mix of struggle and embrace. As Peter Conrad said, writing in the Guardian:
”...he
painted the city as a site where, as his mentor
Robert Henri said, 'the battle of human evolution is going on'. The
weather does its best to massacre his New Yorkers, tormenting them
with frigid winters and suffocating summers; their response to the
vital challenge is to show off the mettlesome resilience of the human
animal.”
(See
also Jackson Leers' use of Roosevelt's reference to “the strenuous
life”.) If this is a bold and somewhat daunting new world, it has
bold and somewhat daunting people in it.
Nature
Tamed And Wild
Given
that the sublimity of the natural and of the urban environment aren't
just analogous but interdependent, it's not entirely surprising that
Bellows also made 'wild nature' paintings - particularly through
trips he made to Monegan island off Maine. In 'An Island in
the Sea' (1911) the frighteningly stark sea barely
separates from the sky, with the island a dominant and menacing block
of blackness. Cottage and boats in the lower foreground are as
dwarfed as the working men in 'Pennsylvania Station
Excavation'. 'Forth & Back' (1913,
both above) is almost an action shot, a close-up of the sea striking
the shore. Had Sharkey's been like this, he'd have just painted the
blow.
Perhaps
more surprising to come across are what were dubbed the 'leisure
views' – less the ravages of wild nature and more society scenes
relocated outdoors. 'Love of Winter' (1914, above)
has a title you'd find hard to imagine shifted to 'Men of
the Docks'. Though its very similar in composition to
'New York', the skating figures move as
consolidated mass. The pure white snow forms a clean background to
frame the bright reds and mustard yellows of the smart coats of the
foreground figures. Working men stopping to take a leak seem absent.
There's something almost Bruegel about the quiet celebration of it
all. Winter becomes a social activity, not a chill to your bones.
The
Ash Canners typically identified themselves against the
Impressionists, who seemed too aestheticised, too European.
Yet 'Snow-Capped River' (1911) uses their bright
colours, even down to the patented purple-tinged snow. It doesn't
just show their influence, it reproduces them at their prettiest.
Perhaps significantly, you'd search in vain for a female face among
the workingmen of 'Men of the Docks' or the nude
urchins of 'Forty-two Kids', while women and girls
are foregrounded here. Yet, for all the oddness of their co-existence
with Stag At Sharky's' and 'New York'
and for all their comparative unoriginality, it should be said these
are in themselves strong works. All of which, alas, was to change...
Atrocious
Wars
Though
opposition to the First World War was virtually a default position
among American Leftists, Bellows soon abandoned his former comrades
to produce a series of anti-German paintings. The most likely
explanation for this would be that he fell for something of a dodgy
dossier. The Bryce Report aka the 'Report of the
Committee on Alleged German Outrages', released in 1915, did
much to marshall American public opinion for intervention. While the
Report should not be seen as mere black propaganda, it seems to have
instilled a feedback loop to lucidless frenzy in Bellows' mind. It's
not that they're propaganda images hitched to an enlistment drive.
You could as well say that Grosz and Heartfield dealt in propaganda
images, and lack of nuance didn't stop them being two of the greatest
artists of this era. It's not that they take a xenophobic and pro-war
position. However disappointing that might be it wouldn't necessarily
mar their aesthetic quality. Its simpler. Bellows' war atrocity
pictures... frankly, they're atrocious.
For
example, 'The Barricade' (1918, above) takes the
allegation the German army used Belgian human shields and goes from
there to depict the civilians as naked. The preposterous and
histrionic image falls into a kind of uncanny valley - not realistic
enough to be real, too cliched to be symbolic. The outstretched poses
of the nudes might suggest Bellows is groping towards some kind of
Classicism, echoed by the foliage in the background. Perhaps he
thought appropriating such tropes might grant his pro-war message
authority. If so, it didn't work very well.
Washed
Up In Woodstock
Wikipedia gives the Ashcan school a short lifespan, dating it's end
to the arrival of Modernism on America shores with the 1913 Armoury
show exhibition. (“Their rebellion was over
not long after it had begun. It was the
fate of the Ashcan realists to be seen by many art lovers as too
radical in 1910 and, by many more, as old-fashioned by 1920.”)
Which may seem unduly neat, but stings of the truth. Bellows
compounds this by choosing 1920 to move to smalltown Woodstock. And
you can't help feeling this resolves an age-old question – when you
take the boy out of New York, you do take New York
out of the boy. As with Duncan Grant repairing to Charleston, rural relocation
blew out the spark.
In
this period he continually produces works reminiscent of earlier
achievements, which are just inferior echoes – as if he'd become
his own copyist. For example, 'Dempsey And Firpo'
(1924, above) is another boxing picture. Theoretically it should look
more dynamic than 'Stag at Sharky's' - one figure
is knocking the other clean out the ring, straight at us. But it
feels the opposite. The figures are stiffer, less plasticated and
expressive, the victorious puncher sports a strangely dispassionate
expression, the front of the crowd reacting more as you would to a
summer shower than a hundred and eighty pounds of flesh descending
upon you. Above all, the theme of two figures locked in ceaseless
battle is lost. It's not a bad work as such, just
a more conventional one. You're unsurprised to read in the indicia
that by this time boxing had become legalised, and hence a society
event. (The
earlier lithograph 'Demspey Through the Ropes', 1923, is
more effective.)
'The
Picnic' (1924) has that slightly lurid quality of painting
pressed into service as illustrational art. The skipping girl at the
rather refined-looking picnic looks like something from the twee
world of 'Alice in Wonderland'. While the hills in
the background look ominous less from the edging darkness but from
weather which seems unable to make its mind up.
Peter Conrad comments: “The later works in the show are dire:
portraits of rich crones, fluffy socialites and their obnoxious
lapdogs, plus some magic-realist landscapes that are too fancifully
magical to be realistic. When Bellows died in 1925, aged only 42,
Edmund Wilson praised his appetite for ugliness; but by then he had
acquired a taste for beauty.”
Harsh,
Peter Conrad, but fair. Yet if Bellows' truly productive career was
brief and chiefly confined to the New York streets, when he was
hitting he hit with an impact. He was the right artist for the right
time, the right place. His works from the Nineteen Hundred and Tens
still strike us, a century or more later.
Coming soon! Most likely something else before the second of these...
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