The Powerful Hand of George Bellows: Drawings from the Boston Public Library

 

June 21 through August 31, 2008

Focus Gallery, San Antonio Museum of Art

SAN ANTONIO — The San Antonio Museum of Art is pleased to present The Powerful Hand of George Bellows:  Drawings from the Boston Public Library in the Focus Gallery beginning June 21, 2008. Considered the most important collection of Bellows’ graphic art in the United States, the exhibition sets a new standard for recording the history and significance of the artist’s drawings. 

            Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1882, George Bellows was known for his painting of urban scenes, and he was often linked with the Ash Can School—a group of early 20th-century American artists known for their gutsy, realistic depictions of everyday life. Bellows’ meteoric rise to success began when he moved to New York City in 1904.  In the next five years, he rose from beginning art student to critical and commercial success, culminating in his election as associate of the National Academy of Design in 1909.  He was a college drop-out at 22, member of the National Academy at 27, the country’s most accomplished lithographer at 35, and dead of appendicitis at 43.

            In twenty-one years of professional life, Bellows created more than 700 paintings, almost 200 editions of lithographs and an equivalent number of drawings. Notorious for a few controversial boxing images painted during his first five years in New York, he is equally notable for his contributions to American landscape painting, portraiture, and scenes of modern urban life.

            Underlying his more celebrated roles as a painter and printmaker, Bellows maintained an active and successful career as an illustrator.  His drawings, fresher and more immediate than either his paintings or lithographs, demonstrate his lively sense of humor and his seemingly effortless talent. Like the best satirical and political artists in the western tradition – William Hogarth, Honoré Daumier, Ben Shahn, Pat Oliphant – Bellows captured with a quickly drawn line the essence of his subjects and then delivered it to his viewers with perception, compassion, and, occasionally, outrage.

            The Powerful Hand of George Bellows presents for the first time to a national audience the outstanding collection of drawings donated by Albert Wiggin to the Boston Public Library. Wiggin, who grew up and began his banking career in Boston before moving to New York, collected over 5,000 prints and drawings, mostly by Old Masters and late nineteenth century English and French artists, but including a few, like Bellows, who established their reputations during his lifetime.

            In 1941, Wiggin gave his collection to the Library, including his near-complete group of Bellows lithographs.  Over the next ten years, he and Arthur Heintzelman, the Library’s first Keeper of Prints, built on the strengths of his donation.  In 1943, working with Bellows’ widow, Emma Bellows, and his long-time dealer, H.V. Allison, the two completed a joint purchase/donation of the group of drawings in this exhibition.

            The Powerful Hand of George Bellows reveals the full range of Bellows’ graphic art: quick sketches in the field to be used later in the studio, finished compositions intended for publication in popular magazines, commissioned illustrations for short stories and serialized novels, preparatory drawings for lithographic editions, and intimate portraits of friends and family. After many years spent in relative obscurity, the drawings of one of this country’s most accomplished artists, as represented by one of the country’s most comprehensive collections, are finally being given the attention they deserve.

            This traveling exhibition has been organized by the Trust for Museum Exhibitions in Washington, D.C., in collaboration with the Boston Public Library. The exhibition is supported by the Helen and Everett H. Jones Exhibition Fund.

            In conjunction with the exhibition, The Louis A. and Francine B. Wagner Lecture Series presents a lecture by Robert Conway, curator of the exhibition, entitled “CHOCK FULL O NUTS: Bellows, Boxing and Ballyhoo”, on Sunday, June 22, at 3 pm. The lecture is free with museum admission and a reception will follow.

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