What Is It Telling Us?

What Is It Telling Us?
PONDERING ONE OF GEORGE BELLOWS’ FINAL PAINTINGS
By Kevin Salatino
When the great American painter George Bellows died prematurely in 1925 at the
age of 42, he had been in the midst of a gradual but conscious shift in style that
was as intriguing as it was eccentric. The writer Sherwood Anderson observed, with
a note of pathos in his voice, that “the late paintings keep telling you things. They
are telling you that Mr. George Bellows died too young. They are telling you that he
was after something, he was always after it.”
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Far left: Detail of George Bellows’ Summer Fantasy (1924).
Center: Kevin Salatino and Huntington paintings conservator
Christina O’Connell assess the condition of the painting prior to
its installation in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American
Art in July. Right: Bellows, in an undated photograph, died in 1925,
less than a year after completing the painting. Portrait is
courtesy of Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian
American Art Museum, J0001254.
17
In a dazzling career spanning only 19 years, Bellows
leapt, effortlessly, from achievement to achievement,
his work characterized by daring technique and
subject matter, incessant experimentation, breathtaking facility, and herculean productivity.
The positive popular and critical reception
of his late paintings—and of the mysterious
“something” in them that Bellows was “after”—is
particularly noteworthy in light of The Huntington’s
recent acquisition of one of the most significant of
his final works: the beautiful and elegiac Summer
Fantasy of 1924 (see page 21), a picture of enormous
ambition and, ironically, optimism, and so unlike
the gritty boxing and urban scenes of his betterknown youth. In fact, the painting seems produced
by the hand of a different artist entirely. Those
earlier works—Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) (below,
center) being the most famous—shocked their
inaugural audiences not so much by their brutal
and explicit imagery (“I just wanted to paint two
men trying to kill each other,” in the artist’s words)
as by the startling visual vocabulary Bellows had
developed to express the dynamism and chaos of
This work contrasts vividly with
any number of Bellows’ earlier,
gritty urban scenes.
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modern life, with a brushstroke as rapid as an
uppercut and a palette as raw as a bloody nose.
That early subject matter—of boxers, street
urchins, crowded tenements, the teeming life of
New York City in a period of explosive growth—
derived from the influence of Bellows’ famous
teacher, Robert Henri, as did his dark, restrained
palette, the legacy of Henri’s worship of the French
Realist-cum-Impressionist painter Édouard Manet,
an adulation he passed on to his pupil. Like Manet’s
work, Bellows’ imagery expanded to include more
resolutely pastoral scenes, particularly of the pastimes
of the leisured classes (primarily polo and tennis),
accompanied by an equal enlarging of his chromatic
range—a brighter, more exuberant palette inspired
by the works of Seurat and Gauguin, and the late
paintings of Renoir.
By 1918, Bellows—who had been interested
throughout his career in color and compositional
theories—had fallen under the spell of “dynamic
symmetry,” a system of mathematically and geometrically conceived ideal proportions based on
the study of ancient Greek architecture espoused
by the theorist and painter Jay Hambidge. So important to Bellows was dynamic symmetry as a
structuring principle that even his summer house
in Woodstock, N.Y., was designed according to
its precepts.
The elaborate pantomime of Summer Fantasy
is as rich in symbolism as a Renaissance allegory
(think, for example, of Botticelli’s Primavera, or
Allegory of Spring, with which there are clear and
probably intentional parallels). The painting does
not depict an actual or, frankly, even an imagined
event, but rather a visionary one (see sidebar). It
functions as a metaphor for, or an idealization of,
the perfect summer’s day—late afternoon in the
Earlier in his career, Bellows was
known for his grittier subject
matter. Opposite, bottom:
Excavation at Night, 1908, oil on
canvas, Crystal Bridges Museum
of American Art, Bentonville, Ark.
Opposite, top: Preliminaries to the
Big Bout, 1916, lithograph, The
Huntington Library, Art Collecions,
and Botanical Gardens. Center:
Stag at Sharkey’s, 1909, lithograph, The Huntington Library,
Art Collections, and Botanical
Gardens.
Bellows is less widely known as
a portraitist. Laura, 1915, oil on
canvas, The Huntington Library,
Art Collections, and Botanical
Gardens.
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Echoes of two great works can
be found in Bellows’ Summer
Fantasy (opposite). Top: Sandro
Botticelli (Italian, 1445–1510),
Primavera, or Allegory of Spring,
ca. 1482, © Summerfield Press/
CORBIS. Bottom: Georges Seurat
(French, 1859–1891), A Sunday
on La Grande Jatte, 1884–86, oil
on canvas, Art Institute of
Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett
Memorial Collection, 1926.224.
magical hour before sunset—thus imbuing it with
nostalgia and longing. On a deeper level, the work
may be interpreted as an allegory of life, from birth
(the pram and nanny closest to us), through youth
and adulthood (the central, striding couple and
their attendants), to death, as implied by the darksilhouetted boat, a classic reference to the afterlife—
all of this underscored by the lateness of day, whose
lengthening shadows suggest fleeting time. The
bridle path at the painting’s core sets the dominant
theme: the race of life.
This work contrasts vividly with any number
of Bellows’ earlier, gritty urban scenes, Excavation
at Night (1908) (pg. 18, bottom left), for example,
where the massive, gaping excavation pit for
Pennsylvania Station’s foundation is as much a
metaphor for the industrial metropolis’ “satanic
mills” and their dehumanizing effect as Summer
Fantasy’s bucolic setting is for a lost and longedfor Arcadia. What is worth noting, however, is the
essential something that connects all of Bellows’
paintings: the desire to elevate his subject matter
from the merely illustrative to the metaphorical.
Indeed, Summer Fantasy seems to stand as a kind
of summation of the artist’s career and themes (as
if he were aware that death was a beat away), akin
in spirit and achievement to Georges Seurat’s
magisterial Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86)
(lower left), a painting Bellows almost certainly knew,
sharing with it an air of achievement and finality.
Summer Fantasy becomes the second painting
by Bellows to enter The Huntington’s collections,
the first being a portrait of his half sister Laura (1915),
acquired in 1983 (pg. 19). Though Laura is a brilliant
example of the artist’s skills as a portraitist, Bellows
is better known for his landscapes (with or without
figures) and was arguably the greatest practitioner
of that genre in 20th-century American art. Summer
Fantasy thus fills what had been—in the absence
of a Bellows landscape—a serious and longstanding
The elaborate pantomime of
Summer Fantasy is as rich in
symbolism as a Renaissance
allegory.
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gap. The Huntington also holds a significant number
of the artist’s prints, which Bellows believed to be
equal in status to his paintings. He was a highly
accomplished and prolific printmaker in a golden
age of graphic art, and many of his most iconic
lithographs can be found at The Huntington, including Stag at Sharkey’s and Preliminaries to the
Big Bout (1916) (pg. 18–19).
With the recent acquisition of two large and
ambitious paintings by Bellows’ contemporaries,
George Luks and Reginald Marsh, the context in
which Summer Fantasy may be understood at The
Huntington has expanded even further. Luks’
dark and powerful painting of the underbelly of
the coal mining industry and its dependence on
child labor, The Breaker Boys (ca. 1925) (pg. 22,
top left), made at virtually the same moment as
Summer Fantasy, provides a startling contrast—
(continued on pg. 22)
BELLOWS’ FANTASY
Compositionally, Summer Fantasy is divided into a series of horizontal bands, like geological strata,
granted a sense of movement by the zigzagging placement of figures in the painting’s carefully composed
landscape. In the right foreground, a nanny dressed in white pushes a baby carriage; spatially closest
to the viewer, she functions as what art historians call a “repoussoir” device, pulling us visually into the
picture. In the left foreground, on a plane a bit further back, a large knot of figures gathers, accompanied
by an imposing dog and another baby carriage. In center middle-ground, a couple (to whose central
position we may attach some importance) strides forward up a gentle hill, the woman enhaloed by
a translucent white parasol (or is it a hat?), her right hand extended in a kind of benediction—a Lady
Bountiful of sorts.
In even deeper space (at the painting’s horizontal center), several equestrians, looking as stately as a
royal procession, canter along a bridle path—two white-horsed riders flanked by two dark. Finally, in
the painting’s background, recreational sailboats ply a turquoise river, one boat dramatically silhouetted
against the fiery reflected light of an apocalyptic sun breaking through El Greco–inspired clouds.
The actors in this bucolic narrative wear vaguely historic costumes (the women more so than the men,
whose clothing is more generically modern), including the anachronistic presence of parasols and long,
flowing dresses. And while saturated shades of green, blue, purple, orange, and yellow dominate the landscape, the defining color of the central characters is white, and leisure the principal activity. Significantly,
it is we, the viewers, to whom the painting’s main actors address themselves, as if the scene were unfolding on a stage in a theater in which we are the audience. Even the nanny in the foreground, though
her face is only suggested, appears to look out of the picture and directly at us.
–KS
George Bellows (1882–1925),
Summer Fantasy, 1924, oil on
canvas, The Huntington
Library, Art Collections, and
Botanical Gardens.
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CONSIGNMENTS NOW
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Bellows’ painting joins
other works in the newly
expanded Virginia Steele
Scott Galleries of
American Art, including
The Breaker Boys, ca. 1925,
oil on canvas, by George
Luks (1867–1933); The
Locomotive, 1935, tempera
on concrete, by Reginald
Marsh (1898–1954); and
The Long Leg, ca. 1930, oil
on canvas, by Edward
Hopper (1882–1967).
TWO MASSIVE BLUE AND
WHITE BALUSTER VASES
Kangxi period
$100,000 - $200,000
Fine Asian Works of Art, June 24
With the recent acquisition of
two large and ambitious paintings by Bellows’ contemporaries,
George Luks and Reginald Marsh,
the context in which Summer
Fantasy may be understood at
The Huntington has expanded
even further.
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aesthetic, historical, and cultural—to the latter,
reflecting the complexities of the American scene
in the pre-Depression twenties. Marsh’s monumental
Locomotive (lower left), a work from a decade later
than Summer Fantasy, and produced at the height
of the Depression, promotes instead a vision of
American progress and industry diametrically
opposed to the sentiment of The Breaker Boys,
which is unsurprising, given Locomotive’s origins
as a government commission.
The timeless Summer Fantasy stands outside
(or falls somewhere between) both of these works,
having more in common with Edward Hopper’s
idealizing The Long Leg (ca. 1930) (top right),
another dream of a perfect summer’s day. Hopper
and Bellows were the same age and in the same
class at the New York School of Art, where they
were considered more-or-less friendly rivals. It is
sobering to reflect that Hopper, who achieved
success much later in life than Bellows, lived until
1967. While Hopper’s work was characterized
throughout his career by slow, nearly invisible
change, Bellows’ was defined by constant volatility
and experimentation. Who knows what directions
his art might have taken had he lived, like Hopper,
another 40 years?
We have hints, of course, of those directions, of
which Summer Fantasy is one of the most fascinating.
Beautiful and compelling in its mastery of light
and color, its profundity of symbolic meaning, its
insistent strangeness of mood, and its powerful
referencing of the past while keeping a firm eye
on the future, Summer Fantasy is a masterpiece
of the artist’s late career—a consummation and
condensation of an all-too-brief life of remarkable
though truncated ambition and achievement.
Kevin Salatino is the Hannah and Russel Kully
Director of the Art Collections at The Huntington.
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