Audio Stop 6

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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.”

George Bellows

New York, 1911

East Building, Ground Level — Gallery 106-B

Completed in February 1911, New York is a large, ambitious painting in which George Bellows captured the essence of modern life in New York City. Bellows did not intend to represent a specific, identifiable place in the city. He instead drew on several bustling commercial districts to create an imaginary composite, an impossibly crowded image that would best convey a sense of the city’s frenetic pace.

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:

The year is 1911, the place is New York City—the epicenter of modernity. And George Bellows dared to take it on in this dynamic painting.

CHARLES BROCK:

What I love about it is its wild ambition. You have a very young artist willing to try anything.

NARRATOR:

Charles Brock.

CHARLES BROCK:

Willing to try as audacious a subject as putting all of New York City into one canvas.

NARRATOR:

Here Bellows imagined the city’s business district, at Madison and 23rd Street, at its most frenetic.

CHARLES BROCK:

There’s an elevated train at the far back, the skyscrapers themselves. And you see this mash up of traffic with horse-drawn carts conflicting with automobiles and pedestrian traffic. It’s a painting that for contemporary viewers was as confusing as the subject matter itself.

NARRATOR:

It’s hard even to know where to look: the streetcar on the far left loading passengers, the storefront signs, the anonymous pedestrians crowding the street. In a sea of grays and greens, Bellows picks out just a few details in red. Critics considered the work disorganized and difficult to read.

CHARLES BROCK:

But they all were attracted to the painting, to the vitality of the painting, the new way in which Bellows was trying to depict the city. And one of the writers, after criticizing the painting, said, “Someday far in the future, it will be pointed out, no doubt, as the best description of the casual New York scene left by the reporters of the present day.”

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