GEORGE WESLEY
BELLOWS 1882-1925
Geraldine Lee #2, 1914
Oil on panel, 38 X 30" (96.52 x 76.20 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 941-0-101
Despite a career prematurely ended by acute appendicitis in 1925, George Bellows was
arguably America's strongest realist painter in the first quarter of the twentieth
century. His art serves as a worthy bridge between that of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins
in the later nineteenth century, and of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth in the
mid-twentieth century. For all the energies of his subject matter and brushwork, however,
he was outpaced by the new accelerations of modern life and art. His career coincided with
the development of motion pictures, the automobile, the airplane, Futurism, Einstein's
Theory of Relativity and early rocket propulsion. All of these in different ways forever
altered human understanding and experience of the natural world. Born in Columbus, Ohio,
where his talent as an athlete almost led him into professional baseball, he returned
throughout his painting career to vigorous sporting images: boxing, polo, and tennis.
(Fig. 1). Although many of these showed figures in action, painted with a sense of the
immediate moment, with vigorous brushstrokes and often new experimental theories of color,
Bellows and a number of his contemporaries never fully grasped the profound new
expressions of space, time and movement of this century.
During this turbulent period, which culminated with the
outbreak of World War 1, Bellows created a consistently personal and powerful body of art,
largely centered on the human figure as a forceful physical or emotional presence. A
warm-hearted family man, he was at his best painting relatives and friends. He moved to
New York City just after the turn of the century, and was drawn into the circle of Robert
Henri's friends and students. His earliest subjects are firmly in the Ashcan manner,
ordinary city types painted quickly and in generally dark colors. Two circumstances had a
critical impact on the development of his art: in 1911 Bellows spent his first
summer on Monhegan Island off the Maine Coast, and two years later the Armory Show
introduced theupheavals of European artistic modernism to New York and America. On the
bold and isolated Maine island he found some of his starkest subjects in the formidable
cliffs and churning surf, which he painted over the next few years with an eye to his
famous Maine predecessor, Winslow Homer. To his portraits at this time he also brought
Homer's example of strong brushwork and reductive form. Painted at Monhegan in August,
1914, Geraldine Lee #2 is such a work.
The sitter was the daughter of a local fisherman, and Bellows first posed her for a
portrait in July of that summer. In Geraldine Lee #1 (1914, Washington
University, St. Louis), her torso was turned in a slightly three-quarter view;
subsequently, however, the canvas was cut down to more of a head- and- shoulders format.
In the second version, owned by the Butler Institute, she faces us directly, sitting
virtually centered in the canvas, frontally aligned and parallel to the framing chair
behind. Bellows's awareness of the new theories of color and design in the wake of the
Armory Show is evident in the clearly calculated arrangement of echoing, nearly geometric
shapes, the subdivision of the canvas surface into rectangles of color, and the palette of
closely related purple and mauve hues. Broad areas of the background (chair back, hanging
drapery, and white wall) are painted thickly with wide brushes, and fit together almost
like solidly textured blocks. But this is more than a mere color study or artful
composition: there is an assured personality sitting before us, straightforward yet
sympathetically seen. The alert solid face and elegant relaxed fingers suggest a complex
character on the threshold between youth and maturity, which obviously held Bellows's
scrutiny over much of that summer.
Bellows's portraits of this period reveal someone very much in control of his stylistic
elements, creating variety and individuality in each adjustment of pose, coloring, and
setting. To keep the figure of Geraldine Lee from being compressed into a two-dimensional
grid he ingeniously painted her right arm extending towards us on the arm of the chair, in
an unobtrusive tour-de-force of fore shortening. Such a synthesis of technical bravura,
awareness of human presence, and aesthetic coherence owes much to the three American
masters for whom he acknowledged his overriding admiration: "Winslow Homer is my
particular pet. And one other American or better, two, stand on the same pedestal with
him, in my mind.... Thomas Eakins and Whistler." We have already noted the appeal to
Bellows of Homer's strong brushwork and solid realism; in turn, Eakins's later portraits
of single figures in darkened settings offered penetrating examples of a sitter's inner
life and character; while the portraits of James Abbott McNeill Whistler conveyed to
Bellows a concern with the harmonies of formal arrangement. It is Bellows's singular
achievement that his own work was no mere derivation or synthesis of his sources, but
fresh and original in its own honesty of expression.
JOHN WILMERDING