George Bellows

Stag at Sharkey's

 Forty-Two Kids

Paddy Flannigan

Cliff Residents

 The Law is Too Slow

The Germans Arrive

Today I finally got the chance to go to MET to see George Bellows' Show which included all his major works. The show was well organized. I noticed the collection came from museums of quite a number of states and cities. Some were from private collections. That was the reason visitors were not allowed to take pictures at the show. The picture above are the result of my online search. 

When I was watching his paintings at the show, I asked myself why I liked his paintings in spite of what I considered to be his technical shortcomings by my own standards. For instance, I think his strokework was crude, his color, sometimes, too raw, images too cartoony. Bellows was good at handling the color value, for sure. Toward the end of the show, I realized that the most precious quality of his works is his spontaneity, which indicates his honesty, the same as how I feel about Impressionists. Even though I don't consider myself an Impressionist artist, I love Monet and other Impressionist masters for the same reason.

After seeing this show, I appreciate Bellows even more because I have  learned he was an artist of conscience and wanted to use his art to interfere with life. He depicted honestly the new immigrants, especially children, living in East Side tenements of New York City in the early 20th Century when American began to industrialize itself. In Forty-Two Kids, those newly immigrated boys fooled around in muddy embankment of the East River. In Cliff Residents, as a commentator pointed out in his lifetime, people living in this kind of crowed ghettos had to suffer in both health and morals. His criticism of war crimes and concerns about social injustice and racial issues are evident in painting The Germans Arrive and lithographic drawing The Law Is Too Slow.