Word: bellowses
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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...