Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/080392/08039939.000

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                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 68

ART

A Passion For Islands


By ROBERT HUGHES

    EXHIBIT: "THE PAINTINGS OF GEORGE BELLOWS"
    WHERE: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
    WHAT: 70 Portraits, Landscapes and Urban Scenes

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A wide-ranging show celebrates the
painter's gusty talent.


    Energetic, full of juice, brilliant in flashes but in the
long haul a most uneven talent, George Bellows died of
appendicitis in 1925 at the age of 42 with a reputation among
Americans that was not going to survive.

    He appealed to "sound" taste in his day -- and then got
flattened from behind by the avant-garde as it developed after
the 1913 Armory Show, which he had helped organize: roadkill,
as it were, on art history's Route 66. He didn't quite have the
empirical genius of the older Winslow Homer, to whom his early
work strongly relates; nor did he quite possess the visionary
force of Marsden Hartley, with whom he shared a love of
romantic, elemental images -- sea, rock, the buffeting air of
Maine.

    What he did have (but began to lose in his early 30s) was
an abundant response to the physical world, a libidinous sense
of fat-nuanced paint, sure tonal structure and a narrative
passion for the density of life in New York City.

    If these attributes couldn't turn him into a major
modernist, they certainly make him an artist worth revisiting.
Hence the retrospective of paintings jointly organized by the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum in
Fort Worth, which runs at the Whitney Museum in New York City
until the end of August.

    Bellows studied at the New York School of Art under Robert
Henri, the American realist disciple of Frans Hals and Edouard
Manet. "My life begins at this point," he said of his
apprenticeship to Henri. He soon developed a tough, pragmatic
repertoire based on realist drawing and tonal composition. He
was by far the most gifted younger member of the Ashcan School,
a loose group that included John Sloan, George Luks and William
Glackens. Not one of them ever painted an ash can, but they did
believe, in a general way, that the artist should work from life
as it was lived in the big dirty city and stay away from
highfalutin symbolism.

    Their gods were Manet, Daumier, Goya and Hals; among
Americans, Homer and Eakins. None were more direct than Bellows,
who in the peak years of his youth became the entranced recorder
of New York, the "real" city of tough mudlarking kids, of
crowded tenements and teeming icy streets, of big bridges and
sudden breaks in the wall of buildings that revealed tugboats
and a dragging tide.

    Bellows' most powerful image of the city as compressor of
violence was the boxing ring. Prizefighting was made illegal in
New York State in 1900. But that did not dispose of the
semi-clandestine "club nights," with battling pugs drawn from
the hard, desperate edge of Irish, Polish, Italian and Jewish
street gangs -- kids who would pound each other to hash for a
purse under the eyes of a flushed, yelling house. The sport was
barely a notch up from the bareknuckle slugging of Georgian
England.

    Starting in 1907, Bellows made a small series of boxing
pictures, of which the most gripping is Stag at Sharkey's
(1909), an image of orgiastic energy, the boxers' faces reduced
to speed blurs of bloody paint, the bodies starkly gleaming
under the carbide lights, locked in a triangle, the strain of
muscles so assimilated into the physical life of the
paintstrokes that the pigment runs over their contours. Bellows'
contemporaries found such images "Hogarthian," but the closer
ancestor of Stag at Sharkey's is late Goya. In particular the
frieze of spectators' heads, yelling, gaping, sly, stupefied,
brings to mind the faces in Goya's Witches' Sabbath or his
Pilgrimage to the Miraculous Fountain of San Isidro.

    Nevertheless, some of Bellows' finest paintings were set
on an island at the farthest possible remove from Manhattan:
Monhegan, on the Maine coast, where his idol Winslow Homer had
also painted. Though born and raised in Ohio, Bellows had
coastal roots -- his grandfather was a whaler at Montauk on the
eastern tip of New York's Long Island -- and the Atlantic was
as fundamental a source of imaginative nourishment to him as it
had been to Melville or Whitman. "We two and the great sea," he
wrote to his wife in a moment of romantic exaltation, "and the
mighty rocks greater than the sea . . . Four eternities." There
are times -- as in the wonderfully ineloquent An Island in the
Sea (1911) -- when Bellows' vision of the coast, a primal
geological scene of humped resistant stone lapped around by
silvery water or great beating green rollers, assumes a poetry
worthy of Winslow Homer.

    The Armory Show -- Bellows' first sight of modern European
painting en masse -- seems to have provoked the change that came
over his work after 1914. Actually, Bellows was given to sudden
shifts of style, but as the art historian Michael Quick points
out in the show's useful catalog, his response to the
transatlantic avant-garde was to get interested in theory, a
fact that "removes Bellows from the Ashcan School context and
places him among the modernist painters of his generation."

    Unfortunately, it did his art no good. Bellows went for
the pedantic structure and managed to annul the immediate and
visceral character of his best work. Hence the generally tedious
commissioned portraits and the stilted "refinement" of his late
salon pieces like Two Women, 1924. His labored attempts at
old-masterly composition in the Baroque manner included a
melodramatic Crucifixion modeled on El Greco and a hammy image
of a heroine of World War I anti-Hun propaganda, Nurse Edith
Cavell preparing to face a German firing squad. The irony was
that Bellows, in trying to turn himself into a European painter
-- or what he imagined a sophisticated European artist to be --
did succumb to provinciality. Earlier he had been a good artist
immersed in a particular place: a very different thing.