Lot Details
Lot 160
George Wesley Bellows American 1882-1925 Coopers Lake, 1924
American 1882-1925
Coopers Lake, 1924
Oil on canvas
30 3/8 x 44 3/8 inches
Provenance:
Estate of the artist (1925)
Emma S. Bellows, his wife
H. V. Allison & Co., New York
Albert H. Gordon, New York
Exhibited:
New York, H. V. Allison & Co., Nine Paintings by George Bellows, Feb. 24-Mar. 29, 1941
New York, The Gallery of Modern Art, 1966
New York, H. V. Allison & Co., Kent, Bellows & Kroll, Dec. 1991, no. 12
Literature:
Marjorie B. Searl and Ronald Netsky, et. al., Leaving for the Country: George Bellows at Woodstock, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York, 2003, pp. 36 and 81, fig. 32, illus.
This work is included in the online catalog raisonne of George Bellows's work compiled by Glenn Peck.
George Bellows first visited the burgeoning artists' community of Woodstock in 1920, at the behest of his friend Eugene Speicher, who, along with Bellows, had studied with Robert Henri at the Chase School. From 1920 to 1924, the artist and his family spent a part of every year in Woodstock, where he executed dozens of landscape compositions that "combine the skills and maturity of an experienced painter with the exuberance of a man reacting to nature with an eternally fresh eye." [Ronald Netsky, "George Bellows' Woodstock Landscapes and the Question of Modernism," Leaving for the Country: George Bellows in Woodstock (Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 2003), p. 30.]
In this bucolic setting, "surrounded by family and friends, he came to recognize that the ordinary, not the extraordinary, matters most in the life of the individual. Friends resting after a picnic, a long-suffering child posing patiently for an artist-father, mountains suffused with the colors of autumn, chickens pecking peacefully in farmyards - in the portraits and landscapes he painted in rural New York, Bellows came to grips with the 'great question of life.'" [Virginia Mecklenberg, "Bellows Before Woodstock," Leaving for the Country: George Bellows in Woodstock, op cit., p. 26.]
In this final phase of his career, Bellows embraced aspects of modernist theory, most notably the Dynamic Symmetry espoused by Jay Hambidge, to transform the scenic countryside into compelling rural dramas that hint tantalizingly at what might have been had he not died from a ruptured appendix in January, 1925. Largely painted en plein air, with a vigorous brushstroke and vibrant palette, Bellows's Woodstock landscapes reflect the intuitive, spontaneous aspect of his work. However he also employed studies as the basis for more resolved compositions painted in the studio, in which he incorporated the structural precepts of Hambidge or distorted natural form, to create compositions that are more surreal or expressionist in character.
One such example is The Picnic, from 1924 [oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 44 1/3, The Peabody Collection of the Maryland Commission on Public Property of the Maryland State Archive, on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art]. A unique statement from the Woodstock years, the painting depicts the Bellows family at Cooper Lake, a site long popular with area artists. In this dream-like scene, the Bellows family relaxes on jagged outcroppings overlooking a surreal landscape, fractured by diagonal lines and geometric forms. At right the figure of Eugene Speicher naps at the edge of a precipitous drop, as Anne Bellows risks life and limb to jump rope in her Sunday best on an angular rock formation and her sister Jean clings to a boulder. Emma Bellows sets out a picnic on a slanting hillside as her husband fishes and regards the unearthly scene before him.
Ronald Netsky has proposed that Bellows painted Coopers Lake before he composed The Picnic. The artist had first depicted his daughters at the lake a year previously, in a crayon and wash drawing, Evening, Coopers Lake, Woodstock, New York. In Netsky's view Coopers Lake was his next view of the site, the artist's first expression of a family outing there. In this first essay, we see a tranquil bluff, rather than the rocky outcropping visible in The Picnic. Anne Bellows stands atop a slight rise as Jean frolics below. Emma is shown in a similar pose as in The Picnic, but the spread that she is shown laying out in that painting is conspicuously absent, and the figure of Speicher is nowhere to be seen. The dramatic sky is beautifully rendered with the vigorous brushwork characteristic of Bellow's first impressions, and the composition is naturally illuminated, without the unearthly, more studied, glow of the companion work. A celebration of Bellows's sojourn in Woodstock with his family, The Picnic is an acknowledgement that Bellows did indeed come to grips "with the 'great question of life.'"
Estate of Albert H. Gordon
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