George Bellows: Exuberance Of Being Alive
Of the George Bellows exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sanford Schwartz writes: ‘Bellows is most associated with the brushy and lustrous realist painting, with its feeling for public life — for surging crowds and commotion-packed doings in densely populated tenement streets — that held sway in New York in the years before World War I.’ And further: ‘In Bellows’s art one finds, especially in his early pictures, which are among the most beautiful made by an American, that his subject is elusive. It seems to be simply (or not so simply) an exuberance in being alive.’
