Video Resource

George Bellows

Subject

Duration

30 minutes (closed captioned)

Language

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Arriving in New York in 1904, George Bellows depicted America on the move. In a 20-year career cut short by his untimely death at age 42, he painted the rapidly growing city of New York, its bustling crowds, skyscrapers, and awe-inspiring construction projects, as well as its bruising boxers, street urchins, and citizens hard at work or enjoying their leisure. He also captured the rugged beauty of New York's rivers and the grandeur of coastal Maine and addressed the social and political issues of the day.

This documentary includes original footage shot in New York City and Maine; examples of Bellows's paintings, drawings, and prints; and archival footage and photographs. This film is available to be licensed in digital format to affiliates.

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We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”

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