Public Favorites (27& 28)

BEFORE he died in 1925, George Bellows summed up his artistic faith in a passionate letter to a critic. "What this world needs," he pleaded, "is Art, Art, and more Art. Art in social, civic, economical relations, in religion, in government. We have a vast deal of science, of flying machines . . . but a great emptiness of imagination, a great barrenness of beauty." Bellows wanted to bring art to ordinary people and he did it by painting things everybody could understand.

A big (6 ft. 2 in., 185 lbs.), athletic man, Bellows chose the U.S. as his subject and never traveled outside its borders. He covered everything from the brittle polo-playing society of New Jersey to the whirling horror of a dance in a madhouse and the wise-eyed dead-end kids swarming the dirty banks of Manhattan's East River. He was one of the most imaginative artists of his time, and also one of the most versatile.

Bellows' bittersweet quality comes clear in the two pictures (opposite) that are favorites with gallerygoers in Manhattan and Bellows' home town of Columbus, Ohio. The Whitney Museum's Dempsey and Firpo shows Bellows at his toughest-- hard, sweaty, and as direct as a left jab. He was at ringside with a commission from the New York Journal to draw the fight. He chose the instant when Firpo nailed the overconfident champion, sent him through the ropes and into the ringside seats. Children on the Porch, at the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, shows Bellows on the opposite tack. His paints become lighter and clearer; the mood is one of quiet serenity on the sun porch of a summer home by the beach. In Bellows' untroubled canvas his little girls read and play dolls without a care in the world.

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