Modern American Life George Bellows (1882–1925)

Abstract

16 March–9 June 2013 In the Sackler Wing of Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House George Bellows came to New York from a comfortable family background in Columbus, Ohio in 1904 and worked with Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. He became a member of a group of young artists who called themselves the Ashcan painters and began to create his energetic scenes of life in the Lower East Side of Manhattan — the river front and the docks, the streets and tenements, great construction projects such as Penn Station, and the illegal prize fights known as stags. As his reputation grew, he went on to produce commissioned portraits, Maine seascapes and, although he never left America, some controversial paintings and lithographs of the brutalities carried out in Belgium …