Bellows

To George Bellows, famed artist, at the height of his career, came Death last week. He died in Manhattan after an operation for acute appendicitis. To his bier flocked many celebrated painters, Art patrons, writers--Ignacio Zuloaga, Charles Dana Gibson, Frank Crowninshield, Joseph Hergesheimer, Guy Pepe Du Bois, Joseph Pennell, John Sloane, Robert Henri, Robert W. Chanler, Albert Sterner, Gari Melchers, A. Sterling Calder.

George Bellows never studied in Europe. He was born in Ohio, studied art in Manhattan under Robert Henri. That artist once said of him: "I can't teach this boy anything; he knows by instinct all that it has taken me years to learn."

Mr. Bellows was blithe. He smacked his lips over life. In Art, he belonged to the school of gusto. Wharf-rats, city parks, snowy clustered roofs, great clumping dray horses, seamy faces of dock laborers, pale ladies, prizefighters, gentle landscapes--he painted all with the impulse of a poet and the hand of a realist. To form he gave a significance from which modernists shrink because it is obvious, conservatives because it is daring and which many art-lovers admire because it is both.

Most prized of the pictures by the artist is his Eleanor, Jean and Anna-- a study of his young daughter posed between his mother and his aunt. This won the Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy (Philadelphia) in 1921, the first prize at the Carnegie Institute's International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1922. In the latter year, his picture Nude Girl with a Shawl, provoked a long and animated controversy between artists and moralists when it was exhibited at the National Arts Club. Last season, his contribution to the New Society of Artists' Manhattan Exhibition--a rude, graphic painting of the Crucifixion--attracted great attention, as did the recent picture he sent to that gallery--Two Women (TIME, Jan. 12). His paintings are hung in many famed galleries, museums, in the U. S. and Europe. Many are the honors, medals, that have been conferred upon him.