National Gallery of Art

From 1907 to 1909, George Bellows executed four paintings depicting the construction site of the Pennsylvania Station railroad terminal in New York City. Undertaken by the Pennsylvania Railroad under the leadership of its president, Alexander Cassatt (the artist Mary Cassatt’s brother), Pennsylvania Station (more commonly known as Penn Station) was an enormously ambitious project. Often compared with the Panama Canal, its construction was a technological feat that helped to transform New York into a thriving, modern, commuter metropolis. A tunnel had to be excavated under the Hudson River to accommodate a new electric train line that would connect Manhattan and New Jersey, and the station also facilitated travel to Long Island. The monumental terminal building, designed by the famous architectural firm McKim, Mead, & White, became the largest indoor space in New York. It comprised an impressive concourse, a waiting room inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla, and huge glass and steel train sheds.

The undertaking was of considerable interest to the general public, and throughout the years that Bellows worked on his paintings, newspapers and magazines regularly reported on its progress.[1]  [1]
For a discussion of the construction of Penn Station, see Jill Jonnes, Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic; The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels (New York, 2007). By early July 1904, when he arrived in New York from Columbus, Ohio, an expanse of midtown Manhattan between Seventh and Ninth Avenues and 31st and 33rd Streets had been cleared for excavation by the New York Contracting Company. On August 20, 1905, The Washington Post reported on the progress of the excavation, calling it the “Biggest Hole Ever Dug in the Island of Manhattan.” Although Bellows left no explanation why he selected the Penn Station construction project as the subject for several large oil paintings, these works were exhibited at important art organizations and thus proved critical to his developing career. His choice of subject was certainly influenced by the aesthetic dicta of his teacher Robert Henri, who urged students to seek out scenes of modern urban life. The excavation site was within walking distance of Bellows’s studio in the Lincoln Arcade Building at Broadway and 66th Street. He may also have had a personal affinity with the subject because his father had been an architect and builder in Columbus. Given the sheer magnitude of the Penn Station project and the feats of engineering technology it entailed, there would have been no better example of modern life in New York City at that time.

The favorable reception of the first painting in the series, the bleak and bluntly realistic Pennsylvania Excavation [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] George Bellows, Pennsylvania Excavation, 1907, oil on canvas, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, Gift of Mary Gordon Roberts, Class of 1960, in Honor of the 50th Reunion of Her Class, did much to establish Bellows’s national reputation. The second painting, Excavation at Night [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] George Bellows, Excavation at Night, 1908, oil on canvas, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, was also well received. Bellows gave the third picture, Pennsylvania Station Excavation [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] George Bellows, Pennsylvania Station Excavation, c. 1907–1908, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Musuem of Art, A. Augustus Healy Fund, to his friend and studio mate Edward R. Keefe; it was never exhibited during Bellows’s lifetime. Critics routinely tempered their praise for the first two paintings with reservations about what they perceived as the artist’s excessive realism. When Pennsylvania Excavation was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1908, Albert Sterner of The New York Times characterized it as “a realistic presentation of the big hole in winter with its bedraggled snow and slush and mud” whose “power and directness of treatment verges on unbridled, brutal crudity that is ‘perfectly stunning’ no doubt, but hardly satisfying artistically."[2]  [2]
Albert Sterner, “Art at Home and Abroad . . . Significance of the Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 1908. When Excavation at Night was exhibited at the New York Academy in 1909, James Huneker commented on its “grim ugliness” and doubted that Bellows would “win the favor of the crowd” because he was “uncompromising in his presentation of hard facts . . . and his candor compels him to present a pit full of steam drills and workmen, harshly lighted by electric rays, as he sees them.”[3]  [3]
[James Huneker], “The Winter Academy,” New York Sun, Dec. 21, 1909. Despite such negative comments about these two paintings, their originality, expressive power, and flawless bravura technique impressed the art cognoscenti and, second only to his boxing subjects, contributed to Bellows’s prestige as an artist.

Executed in March 1909, Blue Morning was the fourth and final painting in the series [fig. 4]   [fig. 4] Entry from artist’s Record Book about Blue Morning, The Ohio State University Libraries’ Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Bellows seems to have taken his critics’ reviews to heart, because it is by far the most aesthetic and impressionistic of the group, devoid of “brutal crudity” and “grim ugliness.” The picture takes its title from the bright, bluish light that pervades the scene, and is painted in Bellows’s characteristic fluid, painterly technique. Unlike the other three pictures, it does not focus on the unedifying sight of the huge excavation pit, but rather the construction workers going about their business in the foreground. Marianne Doezema has demonstrated that the highly contrived view was a combination of factual observation and fantasy: “Bellows fabricated an ideal vantage point on the far side of Ninth Avenue at the center of the excavation. The scene depicted in Blue Morning would have been viewed from a point in midair.”[4]  [4]
Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New York, 1992), 53. Both the composition and lighting effects are complex. An elevated train track runs flush across the entire top margin, and a vertical I beam extends vertically down the right side. These framing devices compress and flatten space and heighten the abstract qualities of Bellows’s design. The scene is dramatically backlit so that the figures are silhouetted against the hazy background, where the back of McKim, Mead, & White’s partially completed terminal building rises out of the indistinct pit, looking much as it did in a contemporary photograph [fig. 5]   [fig. 5] L. H. Dreyer, N[ew] Y[ork] Terminal of P[ennsylvania] T[unnel] & T[erminal] R[ailroad Co.], Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. When Blue Morning was shown at the Exhibition of Independent Artists in April 1910, shortly before Penn Station opened in September, it was barely mentioned in the reviews. Frank Jewett Mather described it in passing as a “remarkable architectural composition.”[5]  [5]
Frank Jewett Mather, “The Independent Artists,” Nation 90 (April 7, 1910): 360, quoted in Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New York, 1992), 55.

In December 1909, Bellows returned to the theme of urban transformation and progress in New York with The Lone Tenement and The Bridge, Blackwell’s Island (Toledo Museum of Art), both similarly atmospheric paintings that allude to another major improvement in the city’s transportation system: the newly erected Queensborough Bridge. The bridge still stands, but despite public outcry Pennsylvania Station was demolished in 1963, its grandiose statuary dispersed to other sites, to make way for Madison Square Garden. Sadly, Blue Morning, along with Bellows’s three other Penn Station paintings, are among the few remaining mementos of what was once one of the greatest edifices of New York City’s Gilded Age.

Robert Torchia

September 29, 2016