George Wesley Bellows 1882-1925

George Wesley Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1882. He studied at Ohio State University, where he was a star athlete. However, the illustrations that Bellows completed for the university’s yearbook better signal his ultimate path: In 1904, Bellows left college to study painting with Robert Henri in New York City. Influenced by Henri and inspired by his tutelage, Bellows became a leader amongst the Ashcan school, described as the “most bold and most versatile” of its members in his choice of subjects, palettes, and techniques. Although Bellows’s art was “rooted in” the gritty realism of the Ashcan School, “the variety of his subjects and his experiments with color and compositional theories” as well as his loose brushwork better “aligned him with modernism.” Indeed, in 1913, Bellows enjoyed a key role in the organization of the famous New York Armory Show. He was greatly inspired by the Modernist work he saw in the show, which led to “one of the most creative and energetic periods of his career.” Choosing to articulate his individuality, Bellows painted with colors not tied to nature, but rather with those linked to his personal aesthetics. Liberating form and color from their normative state, Bellows’s paintings “marked the transition from an art world rooted in idealized academic works to one of personal expression.”

Although he was born and raised in Ohio, Bellows was not “in a true sense a product of that state,” descended from settlers on the Montauk end of Long Island.” Even when living in New York, Bellows was drawn to the water, its “assertive presence” casting a hold over him. While fascinated by the sea, though, Bellows was also frightened of it–– “at times inescapably attracted to it, he was also repelled by it.” Bellows “at last took up the challenge of painting the sea” in the summer of 1910 while in Montauk, a watershed time for him artistically and also personally, as he was newly engaged. In Bellows’s first seascapes, he was influenced by Winslow Homer. These works “[reinterpret] Homer’s pictorial language, with broadly simplified planes of land and sea…and the flattening of space.” Bellows was focused on conveying through his depictions of the sea his conflicting feelings toward it, that powerful dichotomy between beauty and fear. The result was not a “single, clear-cut” or “easily definable meaning” but rather “something profoundly and deeply evocative.” After the impact of the Armory Show, Bellows returned to his seascapes with a new lens. All of their mystery, their uncertainty, was replaced with “an exuberant celebration of the ocean’s boundless, primal energy.”

Tending the Lobster Traps, Early Morning, painted c. 1914, is a wonderful example of Bellows’s movement towards a more modern form of seascape. Bellows had begun to travel to Monhegan in 1911, finding a wealth of subject matter and inspiration in the beautiful Maine land and seascape. His post-Armory experiments with color lent themselves to a personal and expressive group of paintings full of vibrant ultra-marine and emerald green, of warm reds and yellows and oranges. Tending the Lobster Traps shows the sea as a wash of blue-green, at once the dark and mysterious body Bellows had originally depicted and also bright and turquoise, inviting and invigorating. The figures of the fishermen in the midground appear grounded and sturdy, completely at ease with the strength and wildness of the sea. The smaller figures in the background are connected with the sea directly, depicted in the midst of physical interaction with the water. Tending the Lobster Traps echoes Bellows’s earlier “reinterpretations” of Homer’s seascapes, with its almost abstract, flattened space and the simplified blocks of sea and land. Bellows’s incredible technical ability–– his textured, deliberate handling of paint–– adds the dimension to this work which brings it to life.

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