LaurieAnnie's photos with the keyword: Bellows

George Bellows (artist) American, 1882 - 1925 Both Members of This Club, 1909 oil on canvas overall: 115 x 160.5 cm (45 1/4 x 63 3/16 in.) framed: 133 x 177.8 cm (52 3/8 x 70 in.) Chester Dale Collection 1944.13.1 Both Members of This Club was inspired by the fights Bellows attended at Tom Sharkey's Athletic Club in New York. At the time, public boxing matches were illegal in the city. Private organizations like Sharkey's made prospective fighters temporary members of the "club" on the night of the event to circumvent the law. In the painting one can almost sense the atmosphere of stale cigar smoke and body heat that typified these back-room bouts. At the match's frenzied climax, the victorious fighter on the right lunges forward, while the nearly vanquished boxer on the left, his face contorted with pain, weakly resists the blow and momentarily postpones his imminent defeat. Bellows' rapid, slashing brushwork, his characteristic use of dramatic lighting and lurid color, his selection of stark angles and dramatic close-ups all enhance the scene's immediacy. Members of the audience, their faces horribly disfigured by vicarious passion, display an animalistic bloodlust that reveals much about the darker aspects of human nature. The artist is suggesting that the men in the ring, teamed in their physical struggle, also must contend with the larger, perhaps even more brutal adversary of social injustice. Text from: www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/tinfo_f?object=30667

George Bellows (artist) American, 1882 - 1925 Both Members of This Club, 1909 oil on canvas overall: 115 x 160.5 cm (45 1/4 x 63 3/16 in.) framed: 133 x 177.8 cm (52 3/8 x 70 in.) Chester Dale Collection 1944.13.1 Both Members of This Club was inspired by the fights Bellows attended at Tom Sharkey's Athletic Club in New York. At the time, public boxing matches were illegal in the city. Private organizations like Sharkey's made prospective fighters temporary members of the "club" on the night of the event to circumvent the law. In the painting one can almost sense the atmosphere of stale cigar smoke and body heat that typified these back-room bouts. At the match's frenzied climax, the victorious fighter on the right lunges forward, while the nearly vanquished boxer on the left, his face contorted with pain, weakly resists the blow and momentarily postpones his imminent defeat. Bellows' rapid, slashing brushwork, his characteristic use of dramatic lighting and lurid color, his selection of stark angles and dramatic close-ups all enhance the scene's immediacy. Members of the audience, their faces horribly disfigured by vicarious passion, display an animalistic bloodlust that reveals much about the darker aspects of human nature. The artist is suggesting that the men in the ring, teamed in their physical struggle, also must contend with the larger, perhaps even more brutal adversary of social injustice. Text from: www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/tinfo_f?object=30667

George Bellows (artist) American, 1882 - 1925 The Lone Tenement, 1909 oil on canvas overall: 91.8 x 122.3 cm (36 1/8 x 48 1/8 in.) framed: 123.2 x 153.4 x 12.7 cm (48 1/2 x 60 3/8 x 5 in.) Chester Dale Collection 1963.10.83 The Lone Tenement generates both a powerful image of urban dislocation and a poignant allegory of time's passage. The last remaining building underneath the approaches to the new Queensboro Bridge stands alone, everything else in the neighborhood having long since been razed. The oppressive roadway crushes down from the top of the picture, and its span's dark shadow against the red brick tenement seems to foretell the apartment building's doom. The whole composition directs attention to the bridge's architectural mass. Pointed up toward the black roadway from below, a system of vertical elements marches left to right. A factory smokestack, two lifeless tree trunks, the masts of a moored ship, the slender tenement itself, and smoke from a ship on the East River all lead across the canvas to the bridge's heavy pier. The powerful design and the superb handling of earthy umbers, ochers, and siennas make it difficult to believe that George Bellows had moved to New York and begun painting only five years before. Text from: www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/tinfo_f?object=46558