National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Through Oct. 8
“George Bellows and his friend Edward Hopper have been the hare and the tortoise of American realist art,” said Kevin Nance in The Wall Street Journal. Bellows (1882–1925) was the early standout, gaining fame in his 20s with paintings of underground boxing matches: The “nightmarish palette” and “free, gestural brushwork” of those canvases captured the sport’s speed and savagery. But almost from the moment of Bellows’s premature death at 42, Hopper began the rise that has since established him as the standard-bearer of the realist tradition. Well, “the race isn’t over.” The Bellows retrospective that recently opened in Washington gathers more than 130 of the artist’s paintings, drawings, and lithographs, including early cityscapes, gruesome snapshots of World War I, and “surprisingly abstract” Maine seascapes. Those magnificent boxing paintings “steal the show,” but they seem far from one-offs.
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The rooms that focus on Bellows’s early career are in fact “filled with stunning work,” said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. The boxing paintings came to seem “the most modern” of his career because they prefigured abstract expressionism in their “thrilling economy of gesture” and the speed at which paint was apparently applied to canvas. But his quieter scenes were executed with a “similar minimalist expressionism.” His images of the excavation of the Pennsylvania Station site in New York, including 1909’s Blue Morning, are “studies in mood and light” that become “more than the sum of their parts.” His Maine seascapes, such as 1913’s Blackhead and Sea, “have a tempestuous energy every bit as vital” as his sports imagery. During his last decade or so, Bellows became harder to pin down. There is “something odd and terrifying” in his war canvases, but they feel “too plotted,” too schematic. By contrast, the portraits he painted in the 1920s were closely observed, “channeling the ethos of another era.” You can’t help but wonder what this restless artist might have painted if, like Hopper, he had lived into the 1960s.
He probably would have produced work unlike anything we see here, said Sophie Gilbert in Washingtonian. In its sheer range, this show “almost suggests Bellows hadn’t yet found his style when he died,” which is astonishing. His tenement paintings alone might have earned him immortality: No other artist made “the scrappy, ugly, crowded nature” of early-20th-century New York more viscerally real. This retrospective can’t tell us where the experimental visionary was heading when illness struck him down, but it does reveal—and “quite poignantly,” too—“what a loss Bellows’s death was to American art.”
