George Bellows completed Nude with Hexagonal Quilt at his studio in Woodstock, New York, in July 1924. It is among his most ambitious nude compositions and one of the last paintings that he finished before his premature death from appendicitis. He had become preoccupied with the female nude and, from 1923 to 1924, made a series of eight lithographs devoted to the subject. Charles H. Morgan reported that Bellows had originally titled the painting Venus, but his wife “changed his mind.” His first mythological title may have been in response to the reception of Nude with a White Shawl (1919, private collection), which had engendered a controversy at the National Arts Club’s annual exhibition in New York in 1922. Some members objected to the topless model and called the picture “immoral,” and others speculated that the artist had deliberately orchestrated the incident to gain publicity.
The artist’s daughter Jean Bellows Booth recollected that she had peeked through the louvered blinds into her father’s studio while he was at work on this painting and was fascinated by the sight of the nude sitter. The quilt may have served a utilitarian rather than a purely decorative function; Jean remembered that she and her sister, Anne, disliked the carved walnut Victorian loveseat because its horsehair upholstery stuck into their legs. She also noted that the patterned wallpaper never existed in the Woodstock studio.
The nude reclines on a loveseat that appears in six of Bellows’s late figural paintings. She presides over the panoply of textures and patterns that surrounds her, consisting of the drapery on the left side of the loveseat, the floral wallpaper, the transparent lace curtains, and the quilt on which her massive sculptural form rests. Her rather disconcerting presence suggests that she is indeed the mythological Roman goddess of love and not merely a nude model posing in an artist’s studio. The presence of the traditional Victorian pieced hexagonal silk quilt reinforces the initial impression that Venus has inexplicably strayed into a middle-class American domestic interior.
Although other sources have been suggested in the recent literature, the nude’s meditative attitude and pose are clearly derived from Michelangelo’s famous sculpture Night from the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Michelangelo, Night, detail from the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1519–1534, marble, Medici Chapel, Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Bellows may have made a subtle reference to this source by representing the shutter slats closed, thereby darkening the room as if it were night. His preparatory charcoal and black crayon Study for Nude with Hexagonal Quilt [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] George Bellows, Study for Nude with Hexagonal Quilt, 1924, charcoal and black crayon on wove paper mounted to paperboard, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz, 1986.82.1 shows that he changed the position of the windows to make them more prominent in the painting.
Like other female nudes by Bellows, the figure is not idealized. This quality brings to mind the severe criticism that Royal Cortissoz had leveled the previous year at the artist’s lithograph Reducing, Small, Third Stone, in which a seminude woman exercises on the floor while her husband sleeps in the couple’s bed:
It is the mere ugliness of form, an ugliness unredeemed by beauty of drawing or style, which repels, and I speak here not of a quality which is accidental, belonging only to this print, but to a quality running through practically all the lithographs. It crops out even in the studies from the nude. Life, as Bellows sees it, is singularly barren of charm. Whether he is studying the nude model or drawing the heroes of the prize-ring, he appears to find form an affair of brute strength, never of beauty, and this view of the matter enters the very grain of his art.
Although Bellows, in response to Cortissoz and others, may have taken a more traditional, monumental, and classicizing approach in Nude with Hexagonal Quilt, including allusions to the Italian Renaissance, he nevertheless persisted in emphasizing the physical, visceral realities of the female model.
Morgan remarked that Nude with Hexagonal Quilt was “obscurely reminiscent” of Bellows’s mentor Robert Henri’s well-known nude Figure in Motion [fig. 3]
[fig. 3] Robert Henri, Figure in Motion, 1913, oil on canvas, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.69 that had been exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show and noted that “Bellows probed into the subtle problems of weight and texture, exploiting in more graphic form Matisse’s absorption with geometric pattern.” Bellows’s nudes lack the ease and sensuality of those by Henri, although Bellows may possibly have been responding to Henri Matisse’s emphasis on two-dimensional decorative pattern.
Nude with Hexagonal Quilt is closely related to Bellows’s final female nude subject, Two Women [fig. 4]
[fig. 4] George Bellows, Two Women, 1924, oil on canvas, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2014.25. Photography by Edward C. Robison III, a mysterious juxtaposition of a nude and a fully clothed woman seated on the same Victorian loveseat in his Woodstock house. Once again he quoted a well-known High Renaissance source by basing the composition on Titian’s allegorical painting commonly known as Sacred and Profane Love (c. 1515, Galleria Borghese, Rome). As Mark Cole has shown, the curious melding of classical allusions and homespun Americana that characterized Bellows’s last paintings would persist in the work of American regionalist painters like Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889 - 1975), Grant Wood (American, 1891 - 1942), John Steuart Curry (American, 1897 - 1946), and others into the 1930s and beyond.
Robert Torchia
July 24, 2024
