A Passion For Islands

By ROBERT HUGHES

EXHIBIT: "THE PAINTINGS OF GEORGE BELLOWS"

WHERE: WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK CITY

WHAT: 70 PORTRAITS, LANDSCAPES AND URBAN SCENES

THE BOTTOM LINE: A wide-ranging show celebrates the painter's gusty talent.

Energetic, full of juice, brilliant in flashes but in the long haul a most uneven talent, George Bellows died of appendicitis in 1925 at the age of 42 with a reputation among Americans that was not going to survive.

He appealed to "sound" taste in his day -- and then got flattened from behind by the avant-garde as it developed after the 1913 Armory Show, which he had helped organize: roadkill, as it were, on art history's Route 66. He didn't quite have the empirical genius of the older Winslow Homer, to whom his early work strongly relates; nor did he quite possess the visionary force of Marsden Hartley, with whom he shared a love of romantic, elemental images -- sea, rock, the buffeting air of Maine.

What he did have (but began to lose in his early 30s) was an abundant response to the physical world, a libidinous sense of fat-nuanced paint, sure tonal structure and a narrative passion for the density of life in New York City.

If these attributes couldn't turn him into a major modernist, they certainly make him an artist worth revisiting. Hence the retrospective of paintings jointly organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, which runs at the Whitney Museum in New York City until the end of August.

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 was by far the most gifted younger member of the Ashcan School, a loose group that included John Sloan, George Luks and William Glackens. Not one of them ever painted an ash can, but they did believe, in a general way, that the artist should work from life as it was lived in the big dirty city and stay away from highfalutin symbolism.

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 bridges and sudden breaks in the wall of buildings that revealed tugboats and a dragging tide.

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 Jewish street gangs -- kids who would pound each other to hash for a purse under the eyes of a flushed, yelling house. The sport was barely a notch up from the bareknuckle slugging of Georgian England.

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 strain of muscles so assimilated into the physical life of the paintstrokes that the pigment runs over their contours. Bellows' contemporaries found such images "Hogarthian," but the closer ancestor of Stag at Sharkey's is late Goya. In particular the frieze of spectators' heads, yelling, gaping, sly, stupefied, brings to mind the faces in Goya's Witches' Sabbath or his Pilgrimage to the Miraculous Fountain of San Isidro.

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 eastern tip of New York's Long Island -- and the Atlantic was as fundamental a source of imaginative nourishment to him as it had been to Melville or Whitman. "We two and the great sea," he wrote to his wife in a moment of romantic exaltation, "and the mighty rocks greater than the sea . . . Four eternities." There are times -- as in the wonderfully ineloquent An Island in the Sea (1911) -- when Bellows' vision of the coast, a primal geological scene of humped resistant stone lapped around by silvery water or great beating green rollers, assumes a poetry worthy of Winslow Homer.

The Armory Show -- Bellows' first sight of modern European painting en masse -- seems to have provoked the change that came over his work after 1914. Actually, Bellows was given to sudden shifts of style, but as the art historian Michael Quick points out in the show's useful catalog, his response to the transatlantic avant-garde was to get interested in theory, a fact that "removes Bellows from the Ashcan School context and places him among the modernist painters of his generation."

Unfortunately, it did his art no good. Bellows went for the pedantic structure and managed to annul the immediate and visceral character of his best work. Hence the generally tedious commissioned portraits and the stilted "refinement" of his late salon pieces like Two Women, 1924. His labored attempts at old-masterly composition in the Baroque manner included a melodramatic Crucifixion modeled on El Greco and a hammy image of a heroine of World War I anti-Hun propaganda, Nurse Edith Cavell preparing to face a German firing squad. The irony was that Bellows, in trying to turn himself into a European painter -- or what he imagined a sophisticated European artist to be -- did succumb to provinciality. Earlier he had been a good artist immersed in a particular place: a very different thing.