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 George Bellows: American Artist
by Joyce Carol Oates
Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995
69 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
Though he was the most famous and most highly regarded American artist of his era, George Bellows, the intense, prolific painter of the early twentieth century, has remained as much of an enigma to his successors as to his contemporaries. Best known for his gritty, impressionistic depictions of underground boxing and the lower east side of New York, Bellows was also influenced by cultural movements and theories of art as diverse as transcendentalism and surrealism.
In George Bellows: American Artist, Joyce Carol Oates, the celebrated novelist, playwright, and essayist, explores his life and work from the perspective of a writer and admirer. Examining Bellows' art within his historical and cultural contexts, Oates sheds new light on his techincal versatility and voracious imagination. From early New York paintings such as "River Rats" (1906) and "Stag at Sharkey's" (1909), to his turbulent visions of the Maine coast, "An Island in the Sea" (1911) and "In a Rowboat" (1916), to portraiture such as "Mr. and Mrs. Philip Wase" (1924), and pastoral scenes such as "The White Horse" (1922), Oates draws the reader into the brilliant and troubled mind of the artist.
Too versatile to easily categorize, Bellows has often been swept aside into the footnotes of art history. Bringing her own distinctive vision to bear on Bellows' extraordinary oeuvre, Joyce Carol Oates has written an insightful and necessary study of this significant American artist.
Epigraph
The artist's trade is to deal in illimitable experience.
—George Bellows
Excerpt
And what an affinity Bellows had for women, girls, the feminine in its protean manifestations! Clearly, he was fascinated by, if not infatuated with, the essence of Woman. This so masculine man, notorious for his brutal, unsentimental boxing paintings and lithographs, a restless iconoclast of land- and seascapes, created, through his tragically abbreviated career, highly individualized and exquisitely rendered portraits of women of all ages, including the elderly; these deeply meditative, emotionally intense canvases are among the most brilliant portrayals of women in American art. |
Reviews
- Publisher's Weekly, October 10, 1995, p64
- Hungry Mind Review, November, 1995
- Chicago Tribune, December 17, 1995, 14, 6
- San Francisco Chronicle Review, January 7, 1996, p10
- Detroit News & Free Press, January 20, 1996, D, 30
- Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 4, 1996, p11
- Michigan Quarterly Review, Summer 1996, p570+
- Jerusalem Post Books Magazine, August 8, 1996, p2
- School Arts, January 1997, p47
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Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/essays/bellows.html
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