In pictures: George Bellows retrospective
- Published
Artist George Bellows is being celebrated at the Royal Academy of Arts in London this month in the first UK retrospective of his work. One of the great American realist painters of the 20th Century, Bellows' unflinching portrayal of urban life is epitomised by his paintings of the lawless violence at New York's "private" boxing clubs.
In addition to underground fights, Bellows also portrayed sanctioned professional events. The 1916 lithograph Preliminaries to the Big Bout was inspired by the first fight at New York's Madison Square Garden attended by women.
Aside from the brutality of the prize fights, Bellows also sought to capture the lives of the poor on the margins of American cities. In Forty-Two Kids (1907), immigrant children play on a dilapidated East River dock and swim in the river's polluted waters.
Bellows used portraiture - normally reserved for the upper levels of society - to portray intimate accounts of ordinary people found on the streets near his studio. Here the tanned face and arms of Paddy Flannigan contrast with the pallid trunk that points to his social class.
Later in his career, Bellows captured Jack Johnson, America's first black heavyweight champion, as he towered over defeated challenger James J Jeffries. The detail with which Bellows depicts the fighters' expressions reveals their humanity - a significant departure from the anonymity of the boxers in his earlier works.
By the 1920s boxing was big business, and Bellows used sweeps of colour to depict the atmosphere of commercial fights. Dempsey and Firpo (1924) captures the moment when Argentine Luis Angel Firpo knocks the American Jack Dempsey out of the ring. Dempsey got back up to win in the next round.
When Bellows died in 1925 at the age of 42, he was already acclaimed as one of America's greatest artists. George Bellows: Modern American Life, which contains more than 70 paintings, drawings and lithographs, runs from 16 March to 9 June in the Royal Academy's Sackler Wing of Galleries.