Leaving for the Country: George Bellows at Woodstock

Born in Columbus, Ohio, son of a prosperous builder, Bellows starred in basketball and especially baseball at Ohio State. Leaving college early, he reportedly turned down a chance to sign with a major league baseball team to study art in New York in 1904. Along with Guy Péne du Bois, Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent, he enrolled at the Chase School of Art, where charismatic teacher Robert Henri urged them to depict the everyday world around them. "Bellows worked hard, learned fast and made friends easily," Virginia M. Mecklenburg, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, writes in her catalog essay.

Bellows never went abroad, focusing his art on the pageant of America. In line with Henri's advice, he roamed the bustling streets of New York, sketching all manner of activities among all classes. His powerfully painted portrayals of skinny kids swimming in filthy rivers, snowy views along the Hudson River, excavation sites for buildings and vignettes of pugilists duking it out in Manhattan clubs captured the excitement and energy of life in the Big City. Bellows's violent "Stag at Skarkey's," 1909, is considered by many to be the greatest boxing painting of all time and helped make him famous. His work resonated with that of Henri, George Luks, John Sloan and others of the Ashcan School, reflecting the gritty realities of contemporary urban existence.

Bellows was an early success, becoming -- at age 26 -- the youngest member ever elected to the National Academy of Design. His works sold well. He found time as well to help organize and display his own paintings in the trailblazing Armory Show of 1913 that introduced European modernism in America.

Bellows married fellow art student Emma Story in 1910. They established a home/studio at 146 East 19th Street in Manhattan, today a private home marked with a Bellows plaque. Two daughters, Anne and Jean, who later served as frequent models, were born in the next few years.

At Henri's suggestion, Bellows spent several summers in Maine, starting in 1911, on Monhegan Island (where he painted the power of the sea) and around Camden (where he painted construction of a ship and views of his family). Outraged by the atrocities committed by German invaders of Belgium in World War I, he created a series of grim, hard-hitting depictions of the brutalities of war.

Bellows first came to Woodstock to visit Elsie and Eugene Speicher, the latter a painter who had studied under Henri at the Chase School. Bellows loved the rural atmosphere, recognizing its potential for landscape painting, and liked the presence of so many other artists in the town's growing art community.

During the summers of 1920 and 1921, he rented the commodious home of Dr James Shotwell, with grand mountain views and space to entertain artists and other friends. In 1922, Bellows built a home on what is now Bellows Lane, in a compound of houses owned by his artist friends Charles Rosen and Speicher. Utilizing Jay Hambridge's theory of Dynamic Symmetry, which he also applied to composing paintings, Bellows designed the house, doing much of the carpentry work himself. The result is immortalized in a beautiful oil, "My House, Woodstock," 1924.

"By the time he came to Woodstock in 1920 [at age 38], he was no longer a brash young painter of urban scenes," writes Mecklenburg, "but a contemplative man seeking something more profound, more universal than the crowded streets and shifting light of a fast-moving city." A man of boundless energy and restless creativity, Bellows explored many subjects and styles and to the end was always searching for ways to improve his art.

By 1920, Woodstock was well on its way to becoming an important mecca for creative people. In 1903, wealthy heir Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead had established the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts colony, and the spin-off Maverick art community was also underway. The summer school of the Art Students League attracted a steady stream of artists to Woodstock. The Woodstock Artists Association (WAA), which was formed just before Bellows arrived, is still very active in the community.

The WAA exhibited both traditional and avant-garde styles. Rosen, Speicher and Leon Kroll adhered to more conventional work, while Konrad Cramer, Andrew Dasburg and Henry Lee McFee led the modernist contingent. All were Bellows's friends.

To give added context, the exhibition includes examples of work by others in Woodstock. The highlight is German-born Cramer's "Barns and Corner Porch," 1922, a colorful masterpiece of cubism applied to a rural scene. It is in the WAA collection.

Bellows enjoyed philosophizing and discussing art with his fellow painters, and often went on sketching excursions with Rosen and Speicher. Deft Bellows drawings of John Carroll, Rosen, Speicher and others, sketched during frequent poker games at the Rosen house, reflect the camaraderie among the close-knit art colonists.

During his first summer in Woodstock, Bellows completed two of his finest portraits: "Anne in White," 1920, a tenderly poignant likeness of his 9-year-old daughter, seated in a house with a Catskill Mountains view over her shoulder, and "Elinor, Jean and Anna," 1920, contrasting the perky youth of his younger daughter in a white dress, flanked by her black-garbed, elderly grandmother and aunt. Aunt Fanny (Elinor) gestures toward Jean in a pose reminiscent of Old Master paintings. "Emma and Her Children," 1923, is another standout in the exhibition.

The verdant fields, looming mountains, lakes and streams, humble farms and farm animals around Woodstock reignited Bellows's interest in landscape painting. His earliest landscape, "Woodstock Bridge," 1920, a vigorously brushed, dramatically lit scene, presaged many of his later depictions of the area. Among the early highlights in the show, all painted in 1920, are "Trout Stream and Mountains," "The White Fence," "Hudson at Saugerties" and "Pigs and Donkeys."

The brilliantly hued "Autumn Brook," 1922, recently acquired by the Memorial Art Gallery, served as the foreground for a more expansive landscape, "Cornfield and Harvest," 1921.

In a similar vein, "Sunset, Shady Valley (Bogg's Road)," painted in October 1922, provided the setting for the enigmatic surreal masterwork, "The White Horse," completed in November 1922. The latter is a fascinating panorama featuring a white horse gazing at a dramatic horizon in which light streams through white clouds. They "stand as mute and mysterious observers of a landscape's unfolding evocative power," according to art historian John Wilmerding.

Another puzzling painting with surreal touches, its composition dictated by precepts of Dynamic Symmetry, is "The Picnic," 1924. It offers a distorted, bird's-eye view of Woodstock's scenic Cooper Lake, with Bellows himself fishing, friend Speicher napping, wife Emma laying out a picnic and his daughters playing on improbably sharp peaks.

In "My House, Woodstock," showing the painter's substantial white home nestled below Overlook Mountain, the scene is suffused with the vivid colors of autumn. "The Picket Fence," 1924, a closeup view of a country house, was on Bellows's easel when he died, and was completed by Speicher. Writer Joyce Carol Oats has noted that the painting "seems literally to glow with a pale yellow light."

"These works," writes co-curator Netsky, "...contain a vibrancy of color and an urgency of stroke indicative of an artist with an undiminished need for new challenges." At the same time, notes Netsky, Bellows was ambivalent about some of the directions in which avant-garde art seemed to be heading. Nevertheless, he observes, while Bellows "clearly maintained his interest in realism [and in depicting the life around him], his Woodstock landscapes reveal an artist searching for a new direction."

The same search can be discerned in Bellows's Woodstock portraits, particularly two unforgettable oils, "Mr and Mrs Phillip Wase," completed in September 1924, and "Two Women," finished in October 1924.

The Wases are presented as an aging couple, visibly detached from each other, seated on a Victorian loveseat that came from the painter's mother's home in Columbus. They are, as Oates has observed, "an elderly married couple who appear to inhabit contiguous but not intersecting emotional worlds." This is a static, yet masterful, example of hard-edged realism.

Bellows's last figure painting, "Two Women," showing a nude female sitting on the Victorian loveseat next to a fully clothed woman with identical features, has perplexed observers for years. It appears to be modeled on Titian's celebrated "Sacred and Profane Love," although set in Bellows's Woodstock house. The mysterious, romantic quality of this canvas makes one wonder what portraiture lay ahead for the artist had he lived longer.

Throughout his career, critics emphasized Bellows's vigor, vitality and even his athletic ability. Many were concerned when, in the wake of the Armory Show, he embraced the aesthetic theories of Hambridge and Hardesty Maratta, which they felt curbed his instinctive authenticity.

Between 1920 and 1924, Bellows created well over 100 paintings in Woodstock. Many were executed in conformity with Maratta's color theories, a complex system involving blends of primary and secondary colors. They also incorporated Hambridge's Dynamic Symmetry, a compositional system involving orderly grids dividing the picture plane.

Other observers never flagged in their high regard for Bellows's Americanness and ability to communicate his art to the man in the street. Overall, his popularity remained high in his last years -- and thereafter. In 1999, his animated painting "Polo Crowd" was sold to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates for the highest price ever paid at auction for the work of an American artist.

Curator Searl suggests that in his Woodstock years Bellows was coming to "terms with the tensions and bonds of youth and age, parent and child, the erotic and the platonic." She writes that, "Having staked his claim as an urban realist when he was much younger, now was the time to reassess where he had been and where he was heading; now was the time to consider some of the bigger questions of life, to respond to them and to move his work to a new plane."

The curators have it about right when they conclude that in his Woodstock phase Bellows "created vibrant, strong landscapes while he was on his way to producing some of the most complex figure paintings of the period. Eighty years later, Bellows's Woodstock paintings deserve renewed recognition as an important component of a masterful career."

After suffering from what was thought to be "chronic indigestion" during the summer of 1924, Bellows returned to New York where he busied himself with pressing projects. Continuing to ignore the pains, he died in January 1925 of complications from a ruptured appendix. He was only 42.

There is no telling to what heights Bellows's art would have gone had he lived longer. He was clearly moving in fresh and exciting directions, blending Old Master discipline with modernist tendencies after 1920.

In his abbreviated career, Bellows established himself as one of America's finest painters. He will always be remembered for his down-to-earth depictions of life in New York, his stirring portrayals of boxing contests -- and now, thanks to this exhibition, for the bold landscapes and masterful portraits of his final years.

The 112-page, fully illustrated catalog is attractive and informative. It includes chapters by co-curators Searl and Netsky, by Woodstock historian Alf Evers, and by Bellows authorities Mecklenburg and Mark Andrew White. Published by the Memorial Art Gallery, this valuable contribution to scholarship about American art is available for $29.95.

The Terra Museum of American Art is at 664 North Michigan Avenue. For information, 312-664-3939.