Fight Nights: The Brief Candle of an American Artist
Last edited Sat Oct 22, 2016, 10:03 AM - Edit history (1)
“I don’t know anything about boxing. I was painting two men trying to kill each other.”
---George Bellows
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“ Stag at Sharkey’s” 1909. Cleveland Art Museum.
Just last month I was in the coolly tasteful, white walled National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and confronted by the lesser known of Bellows’ painted nightmares of stag fights, “Both Members of This Club,” seen here
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It so jolted me away from the rest of the paintings in the American Collection room -- as gritty as the Ashcan School works could be with its Bellows and Sloans mixed in ...that I circled around and took a second...and then a third look at this remarkable painting. What were its smells, smoke, noise and downright insane crowd faces doing in this genteel place?
Quite frankly, this confrontation of racial outrage and fury by a white artist of its time shocked me. Now I was not looking at the fight of two white men but of one black and one white. The brush stroke that I had admired in the fighters legs in “Sharkey’s” was brushed deeply in this painting’s meaning. The complex motions of the legs and the arms of the fighters, the blood smears, the crowd’s menacing force, were all subject to the political significance of the art at that moment.
I now knew the answer to this question: when does art hurt?
For the whole meaning of a social situation that would produce such a brutal assemblage in the first place had its rightful, stunned moment of recognition...we have met the enemy and he is us...or was us at that time...but the racial statement here precluded so much that we think we have learned -- and accomplished -- yet really have not...
George Bellows was an Ohio kid who loved sports and played semi pro baseball. He was as middle American as you could get in those days. And he moved to New York in his third year at Ohio State because he wanted to get closer to social realism and to portray it, as so many of his fellow social realists did.
There he met others of the then-burgeoning days of the Ash Can school of American art. Ash Can was a social movement as well as an art destination for the nation’s artists who flocked to New York to find their own niche as artists in such a roiling time. Its teacher of the day was Robert Henri, who famously told his students to go out into the streets and seek out the ordinary people at their daily work and play, including its dangers and crumbling living conditions. Paint that, he said.
When Bellows concentrated on his boxing series he was doing something important for the socially and politically aware. He was presenting men in the boxing ring beating each other to a pulp for the entertainment of the crowd, who could bypass the law against boxing matches by going to a “private” club, such as Sharkey’s.
Bellows captures the riotous sense of “being there” to watch unconstrained combat between two men willing to be bloodied for a very small purse -- a dead end way of earning money through howling pain. New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl writes on a Bellows 2012 retrospective:
Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting.
Joyce Carol Oates in her Bellows monograph writes that these two paintings, while “realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”
The aspiring Ash Can artists practically moved in with the social realists of their day to capture the zeitgeist they were experiencing around them... and boxing was but one theme of their heady movement.
A wonderful outcome here was the ascent of socially aware portraiture. One of the most poignant and powerful portraits, Paddy Flanagan, by Bellows sums it up
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Paddy Flanagan. 1908. National Gallery. Washington, D.C.
Look at this kid and you see the face of impudence and survival, an act defying the odds with a kind of courage that is hard to fathom. I wonder how old he could be. His spine is already bent over, his fingers knobby and reddened, as if he had been caught right after a fist fight, and he is abnormally skinny from malnutrition. He is unkempt, ragged and shirtless. The early 20th century child labor laws had not yet been passed at the time this was painted, but perhaps it in some way encouraged them. Nothing bespeaks the poverty of children in his day like we see on this canvas.
Bellows joined the Group of Eight, the artists of the day that were dedicated to this movement and its goals. But in 1913 the history of art had a sudden world shaking event. American artists witnessed the new revelations in European modern art at the 1913 Park Avenue Armory Show (in which Bellows was a participant). I think he just didn’t see it coming. All the isms...Cubism, Futurism, Fauvism...as the avant-garde took the center of attention of the art world...would of course change the world of art as he knew it.
Bellows was not a fan of Cubism and said so. It “ merely laid bare a principle of construction which is contained with in the great works that have gone before.” Adept as he was with his impressive city/riverscapes (and particularly one in which could flaunt his treatment of snow) and his seascapes in Maine, they were suddenly “the past” and art had moved on from them.
Poor Bellows. He went through a period where he seemed to catch anti-German hysteria at the eve of World War One, painting that hysteria shown in his sad, artistically diminished depictions of atrocities (perhaps with Goya-like justification in his mind?) that may or may not have been accurate. His art would never be the same. He died of peritonitis in January 1925 at the age of 42, having ignored the pain of a ruptured appendix.
Looking back on the course of art in Bellows day, we have to wonder how he would have evolved in his career. In his absence there rose other “stars" such as Edward Hopper, and then, Jackson Pollock, to address and shape the American manner.
Had Bellows lived as long as his fellow student Edward Hopper did, would Hopper’s fame have been eclipsed at some point, as some critics like to retroactively imagine? Or was Hopper able to develop his theme even further because of Bellows’ absence?
I immediately think: if Bellows had lived would we have Hopper’s sunlight on the El tracks, ever there for our delight? Would we still see Jo awash in Sunday morning light on her bed in that reflective pose?
I like to think that we would.
= new reply since forum marked as read
which one is the "third one" you are referring to? Is it Dempsey-Firpo?
This one is also famous but doesn't come near to the artistically wonderful other two.
My grandfather came to the US as a boy, in the 1870s. He loved baseball; one of his brothers, who he was very close to, was a boxer. Uncle Pat was born in New Jersey in the 1890s, and not only fought a long, tough career, but was a sparring partner for heavyweight champions, a trainer, manager, and promoter. His pro career ended in the 1940s. (He also worked on the railroads. He would find a tough, street-fighting kid in upstate NY, teach him to box, and promote all of the kid's early fights. That kid was Carmen Basilio, who went on to win the welterweight and middleweight titles. Carmen remained a family friend; he worked my brother's corner in his pro debut. I was honored to be able to introduce him to my children!)
The list of boxers the brothers knew and associated is vast -- a real "who's who" from that era. As you note, it was a brutal lifestyle. Much worse than today.And, for every one fighter who was successful, there were literally hundreds who absorbed terrible punishment for the money needed to support their families.
There was a good movie a while back, "Cinderella Man." It's based upon the career of James Braddock (also nicknamed, "The Bulldog of Bergen"
. It shows the terrible conditions that even talented fighters competed under, when he turned pro in the late 1920s. A funny thing: for his first defense of the heavyweight title, he lived part-time at my great uncle's home. Uncle Pat helped train him. (Unfortunately for Braddock, though Uncle Pat had been a perfect sparring partner for those preparing to face the great Jack Dempsey, he wasn't able to be of much help to anyone preparing to fight a prime Joe Louis!)
you can see it in their style.
Looking at what you posted, does this style look familiar?
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