George Wesley Bellows
Standing Female Nude
c. 1915

Name: Standing Female Nude
Brand: George Wesley Bellows
Rating: 5 (106 reviews)

$4,500List Price

About the Item

Standing Female Nude Graphite on wove paper, c. 1915 Signed by the artist's daughter, Jean Bellows Booth (JBB) see photo Provenance: Estate of the artist H. V. Allison Galleries (#94 on partial label) Ronald Sloter, Columbus, OH Columbus College of Art and Design Biography George Wesley Bellows grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the son of a devout and solidly Republican building contractor, and a mother who hoped that her son would become a Methodist Bishop. He always felt deeply ambivalent about his father, noting at the time of his death that, "He was a wonderfully fine man, yet being fifty-five when I appeared, his point of view, his character even, belonged to so remote a past that I look upon many of his ideas to this day with amazement and sorrow." Teased as a sissy by his classmates, George Bellows quickly learned to defend himself with his fists, and compensated for his gangling awkwardness by becoming an outstanding athlete, particularly in baseball. His love of drawing was kindled early since he was forbidden to play outside on Sundays but allowed to draw while his mother read aloud from the Bible. At Ohio State University, George Bellows proved a spirited extrovert, excelling in baseball as well as in the new sport of basketball, singing in theatricals, and producing drawings of Gibson-like girls for the university's magazine. Bellows's athletic prowess almost diverted him from a career in art, but in 1904 he decided to turn down a professional baseball contact and move to New York City to study painting. The sprawling, teaming city of New York was a revelation to him after the neat lawns and tidy homes of Columbus. There he quickly fell under the spell of the charismatic teacher Robert Henri, who introduced him to Shaw, Ibsen and socialism, and inspired him to shift from drawing Gibson Girls to painting the life of the streets. Bellows was still a relative newcomer to New York when Henri and his followers staged their famous exhibition of "The Eight" at the Macbeth Gallery, and consequently he was not included. But in spirit his work belongs with that display - perhaps someday Henri’s group will be rechristened "The Nine" to pay tribute to the fact that George Bellows was the painter whose work best expresses the goals of the group. In 1906 Bellows painted his first masterpiece, "The Cross-Eyed Boy." He followed with several other equally memorable likenesses of street urchins, and then expanded his vision with a series of masterful urban scenes that record such subjects as boys swimming in the East River, bums swarming around a lone tenement, the bridge to Blackwell's island, or the great scar created by the excavation of Pennsylvania station. A dozen or more of these canvases rank with the best American paintings ever made. Perhaps his masterpiece was his boxing scene, "Stag at Sharkey's," inspired by Sharkey’s saloon, just across the street from the Lincoln Arcade where he had his studio, where amateurs pummeled each other on "Fight Night." The painting has become an icon of American art, perhaps the most memorable single expression of the tough, rough excitement of the modern city. Dazzling in its execution, the brushwork has the same athletic bravura as the scene itself, as befits a painter who was also a star athlete. In 1910, after a long and at times tempestuous courtship, Bellows married a very proper American girl, Emma Story, in St. George's Episcopal Church in the Bronx. They had two children, Anne, born in 1911 and Jean, born in 1915. After his marriage, Bellow's subject matter began to shift. While he continued to paint urban scenes, increasingly he focused on landscapes of Maine and Woodstock, as well as portraits. Somewhat surprisingly, the painter of bums and boxers proved particularly adept at sensitive portraits of women, including many masterful likenesses of his wife and daughters. Just a year before his death he painted the most famous of these, "Lady Jean," showing his ten-year-old daughter Jean dressed in quaint Victorian attire. Appropriately, Jean later became an actress, appearing on Broadway opposite such stars as Helen Hayes. While the vigor of his work conveys an unselfconscious feeling, George Bellows was actually a remarkably intellectual painter, who mastered a variety of different color systems, including those of Hardesty Maratta and Denman Ross, and also explored complex systems of design, such as Jay Hambridge’s theories of "Dynamic Symmetry." Along with being a great painter, George Bellows was also one of this country's greatest printmakers, who exploited the technique of lithography to make prints that are as fresh and natural-looking as a charcoal sketch. In executing these designs, George Bellows worked closely with the great printer Bolton Brown, who along with George Miller ranks as one of the two most significant American lithographers of the 20th century. The delicacy of Brown's printing, however, was unique. While Miller produced richly tonal effects for artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Brown produced lithographs with a silvery delicacy that almost perfectly matches a pencil line, and gives Bellows's prints the fresh, silvery appearance of actual drawings. Sadly, George Bellows died of appendicitis, at the height of his fame and artistic prowess, at the early age of forty-three. Later that year a great memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At the opening, Bellows' teacher, Robert Henri squired his widow, Emma, through the opening, and when it was over he turned to her in tears. "I always gave him my most severe criticism," he commented, "because I thought he was my best pupil. Now I am sure of it." Bellows's fame came early and has proved long lasting. At the age of twenty-three, he attained membership in the National Academy of Design, and at the age of thirty-one became a full academician, the youngest painter ever elected to that body. By the age of thirty his work hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as much an honor as it would be today. Today he is still ranked as one of the giants of American art - a figure whose tough-minded realism rivals that of Eakins, whose technical virtuosity rivals that of Sargent. Dr. Henry Adams

Creator:
George Wesley Bellows (1882-1925, American)
Creation Year:
c. 1915
Dimensions:
Height: 11.13 in (28.28 cm)Width: 8.88 in (22.56 cm)
Medium:
Graphite
Movement Style:
Ashcan School
Period:
20th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Fairlawn, OH
Reference Number:
Seller: FA72911stDibs: LU140128774

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George Wesley Bellows

George Bellows, an American artist, was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1882, the only child of a successful building contractor from Sag Harbor, New York. He entered Ohio State University in 1901, where he played baseball and basketball and made drawings for college publications. He dropped out of college in 1904, went to New York, and studied under Robert Henri (American, 1865 – 1929) at the New York School of Art, where Edward Hopper (American, 1882 – 1967), Rockwell Kent (American, 1882 – 1971), and Guy Pène du Bois (American, 1884 – 1958) were his classmates. A superb technician who worked in a confident, painterly style, Bellows soon established himself as the most important realist of his generation. He created memorable images of club fights, street urchins swimming in the East River, and the Pennsylvania Station excavation site and garnered praise from both progressive and conservative critics. In 1910 Bellows began teaching at the Art Students League and married Emma Story, by whom he had two daughters. After 1910 Bellows gradually abandoned the stark urban realism and dark palette characteristic of his early work and gravitated toward painting landscapes, seascapes, and portraits. Bellows helped organize the Armory Show in 1913, in which five of his paintings and a number of drawings were included. That year he was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design. He had leftist political views and contributed illustrations to the Socialist publication The Masses from 1912 to 1917. Bellows began to make lithographs in 1916 and his exceptional talent engendered a revival of interest in the medium. He worked in Maine, in Carmel, California, and in Middletown, Rhode Island, and was a founding member of the Society of Independent Artists and a charter member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. In 1919 he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago. Bellows, who never went to Europe, is regarded as a quintessential American artist whose vigorous style enabled him to explore a wide range of subjects from scenes of modern urban life to portraits of his daughters, to turbulent Maine seascapes. As an early biographer noted, Bellows “caught the brute force of the prizefighter, the ruggedness of the country pasture, the essence of childhood and recorded them appropriately not only for his own generation but for all time.”[1] [1] [Frederick A. Sweet], George Bellows: Paintings, Drawings and Prints (Art Institute of Chicago, IL, 1946). Robert Torchia September 29, 2016

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