George Bellows
1882 - 1925
George Bellows was strongest American realist painter in the first decades of the twentieth century.
His art spans the gap between the art of 19th-century masters of psychological realism that created popular stereotypes and the art of big American realists, later in the mid-twentieth century.
He was born in Columbus, Ohio. At Ohio State University his talent as an athlete almost led him into professional baseball. But his first love was art and he left school to study art in New York where he became a student and the follower of Robert Henri leader of the Ashcan School. He was also closely associated with The Eight.
Bellows developed a strong social conscious and eventually took the characteristics of exploring the extremes of New York life, even further than did the artists who had trained as news reporters.
Painting realistic portraits of everyday urban life, he returned to vigorous sporting images: boxing, polo, and tennis. they were rendered in an anti-academic technique that some found unsuitable and crude but others perceived as expressionistically bold, accurate, and important, documents of the time. For his audience, his art was about "real life." He was one of the apostles of force, who was outpaced by the new rush and crush of modern life and art.
All of his later approvals helped establish his reputation as a painter who found excitement where weaker souls saw only ugliness. George Bellows died on 8th January, 1925 in New York.
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