St. Olaf College

George Wesley Bellows

Contemporary American realism, Ashcan School, Modern art painter, lithographer
United States
1882 - 1925

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George Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1882. He started college at Ohio State University in 1901, where he played both baseball and basketball while also publishing drawings in school publications, but dropped out in 1904. At that time he went to New York, where he began to study art under Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. He began to paint the urban landscape of New York and its inhabitants, including club fights and street urchins. By 1909 he had established himself well enough as an artist that he became one of the youngest to be admitted as an associate member of the National Academy of Design. The following year he began teaching at the Art Students League, at which point his subject matter turned from the gritty urban landscape to seascapes and portraits, in which he explored color theories and various dynamic and compositional systems.

In 1913, he helped to organize the Armory Show, and was admitted as a full member to the National Academy of Design. From 1912 to 1917 he contributed art to a leftist publication known as The Masses. In 1916, Bellows took an interest in lithography, and his talent helped to spark a revival in the art form. He worked in numerous places around the country, but never abroad; his final teaching position was at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught in 1919 only to move to a newly-bought house near Woodstock, New York, the following year. Bellows died in New York in 1925.


Madison Duran ‘20
September 2019

Sources:
“George Bellows - 28 Paintings.” www.wikiart.org, https://www.wikiart.org/en/george-bellows.
“George Bellows,” Union List of Artist Names, The Getty Research,
http://www.getty.edu/vow/ULANFullDisplay?find=george+bellows&role=&nation=&prev_page=1&subjectid=500003261.
Torchia, Robert. “George Bellows Biography,” National Gallery of Art, 23 Sept. 2016,
https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.940.html.