My Family, 1916

From 1915 to 1920 George Bellows participated in four exhibitions organized by the National Association of Portrait Painters, a group that had been founded in 1912 for the purpose of avoiding “the tiresomely conventional and perfunctory portrait.”[1]  [1]
Alice T. Searle, “Exhibition of the National Association of Portrait Painters,” International Studio 46 (May 1912): 63. During the summer of 1916, when the artist and his family were staying in Camden, Maine, Bellows began to experiment with plein air portraiture in which he attempted to integrate the human figure with the outdoors. Bellow’s struggle to finalize this new style is confirmed by two monumental portraits that Bellows left unfinished: My Family and the nearly identical Study of Emma and the Children  [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] George Bellows, Study of Emma and the Children, 1917, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, A. Shuman Collection—Abraham Shuman Fund. © 2017 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Although the relationship between the two versions is unclear, it is generally assumed that the latter was a preparatory study for the former.[2]  [2]
The Boston version is divided into a grid pattern and the fabric support has been folded at the top and bottom, indicating that Bellows experimented with altering its dimensions. It also has a darker tonality than the Gallery’s painting. While Bellows altered the palette from red and purple to green and purple, both show his wife, Emma, reclining in a hammock with their young daughter Jean by her side and their older daughter Anne, whose back is turned toward the viewer, about to climb in and join them. They are sheltered from the sun by a prominent striped awning that runs along the top margin of the composition. The figures are framed by dense foliage in the foreground and at the right and left, and the background comprises a verdant landscape with a house. The overall effect is one of warmth and domesticity.

Jane Myers has noted that in these two paintings “Bellows daringly evoked a range of European sources, from the English ‘conversation piece’ of the 18th century to the avant-garde, tapestry-like paintings of the French Nabis, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard.”[3]  [3]
Jane Myers, “‘The Most Searching Place in the World,’ Bellows and Portraiture,” in Michael Quick, Jane Myers, Marianne Doezema, and Franklin Kelly, The Paintings of George Bellows (New York, 1992), 203. The emphasis on geometric forms, however, suggests that Bellows was preoccupied by the example of Paul Cézanne. In this respect he was probably following the advice of fellow artist Leon Kroll, who, at the urging of Bellows’s mentor Robert Henri, had joined Bellows in Camden in the summer of 1916. Kroll rented a house next to the Bellows family, and the two artists worked together.[4]  [4]
Valerie Ann Leeds, Leon Kroll Revisited (New York, 1998), 13. The former had just begun “to assimilate the French master’s lessons into his own work.”[5]  [5]
Valerie Ann Leeds, Leon Kroll Revisited (New York, 1998), 12. Kroll encouraged his colleague to investigate impressionism and postimpressionism, and later recollected: “I gave Bellows some criticism every day. He was in a rut, and he loved the criticism.”[6]  [6]
Nancy Hale and Fredson Bowers, eds., Leon Kroll: A Spoken Memoir (Charlottesville, VA, 1983), 42, quoted in Jane Myers, “‘The Most Searching Place in the World,’ Bellows and Portraiture,” in Michael Quick, Jane Myers, Marianne Doezema, and Franklin Kelly, The Paintings of George Bellows (New York, 1992), 204. Kroll’s own forays into plein air portraiture that summer are documented by two paintings of the Bellows family: Summer Days, Camden, Maine, The Bellows Family (1916, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA) and In the Country [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Leon Kroll, In the Country, 1916, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Special Membership and Donations Fund with a contribution from Mr. J. J. Crowley. © Detroit Institute of Arts / Bridgeman Images.

Bellows may have abandoned the two family portraits because he was unable to resolve the relationship between his human figures and their natural surroundings. His family is almost completely overwhelmed by their environment and fail to stand out as the proper subject. The culmination of Bellows’s experimentation with the impressionist plein air portrait in Maine that summer is Emma in an Orchard [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] George Bellows, Emma in an Orchard, 1916, oil on canvas, Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville. Purchased with funds from the Cummer Council, AP.1980.1.1., a considerably smaller and more fully resolved portrait of his wife inspired in part by Édouard Manet’s Madame Manet in the Conservatory (1879, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo).

Bellows made a third version of My Family in the form of his 1916 lithograph Mother and Children [fig. 4]   [fig. 4] George Bellows, Mother and Children, lithograph published in The Masses (June 1917): 18, New York University. Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives that was reproduced in the radical leftist magazine The Masses (June 1917) under the title June Again.[7]  [7]
Lauris Mason, with Joan Ludman, The Lithographs of George Bellows: A Catalogue Raisonné (1977; rev. ed. San Francisco, 1992), no. M. 16, 56–57. The contours of the forms are noticeably less geometric than in either of the paintings, and Jean is represented as an infant rather than a toddler. In 1923 Bellows returned to the subject in the magnificent, if far more conventional, portrait of his wife and daughters, Emma and Her Children (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Bellows’s depictions of his family were in keeping with Henri’s belief that modernism was a capacious term encompassing not only radical political agendas and pictorial experimentation but also more conservative subject matter and a knowledge of and reverence for artistic precedents and traditions.

Robert Torchia

August 17, 2018

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