ART REVIEW : Bellows’ One-Two Punch : Artist’s Duality on View in County Museum Retrospective

You may not think you remember George Wesley Bellows, but you do.

Both of him.

In the 1910s and ‘20s, he was the idolized Wunderkind master of the Ashcan School, a gang of bully artists around New York and Philadelphia who changed the course of American art. Like the yellow journalists of the day, they had the intestinal fortitude to look gentility in the eye and spit. Not for them the Jamesian society portraits of John Singer Sargent or the dappled discretion of Childe Hassam and the other American Impressionists.

The Ashcan School was going to tell life as it is, a roiling tumble of unruly energy acted out in saloons, music halls and on the banks of muddy rivers. Bellows did some fight paintings that became such icons they made it out of the art books and onto calendars and into tomes on American history. It’s hard to imagine anybody who hasn’t seen those classics of American violence, “Stag at Sharkey’s” and “Dempsey and Firpo.”

But not in the original, and not on the West Coast in living memory. On Sunday, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened a retrospective of Bellows’ paintings organized in cooperation with Ft. Worth’s Amon Carter Museum. It comes with a fat catalogue that is pretty genteel but smart in the way it probes Bellows’ life and times. This is the show’s debut. It will travel to museums in New York, Ohio and Texas. It was installed here by LACMA American art curator Michael Quick and designer Bernard Kester.

One look ignites wonder at why we’ve not seen such a survey earlier. Bellows’ art, full of vinegar, is well worth a look. Part of the reason for the delay is that Bellows’ generation has been under a deep historical shadow that was, in a way, self-made.

They were such ecumenical art enthusiasts that they helped organize an exhibition of advanced European art. When it arrived in New York in 1913, the Armory Show introduced a delightedly enraged American public to avant-garde art from Cubism to Expressionism. The Ashcan boys helped bring modernism to our shores and, like Samson, pulled the existing temple of art down around their own ears.

For decades, Bellows looked like a period piece. By now, an obdurately persistent scholarly revival of art in the American realist tradition has intersected with changes in the real world in such fashion as to make Bellows’ art able to speak to us directly once more. The situation is parallel to that of LACMA’s 1990 presentation of a survey of the art of Thomas Hart Benton. Reviving the painting of the crusty old Regionalist seemed like the exhumation of a dinosaur until a contemporary audience already dogged with forebodings of hard times saw their own troubled psyches mirrored in Benton’s Depression-era art. If Benton did not seem great, he at least seemed relevant, his nostalgia and isolationism understandable, his neurotic Expressionist distortions, familiar in feeling.

Bellows didn’t live to see the Great Depression, dying in 1925 at 42. But behind its brio, his art reveals both personal anxiety and the social stress that led up to the Crash of ’29. It was a world rather like our own in being unsettled and unsure of its future, haunted by rising social and racial tensions. The parallel between the ‘20s and ‘80s has already been drawn.

The artist was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1882, and studied with Robert Henri at New York’s Chase School. Athletic and friendly, he married young, had two daughters and generally comported himself like a regular guy.

Hard worker. Living in New York, he summered on the islands and retreats traditional to the East Coast, painting vigorous landscapes. Once made a visit to Carmel.

Never went to Europe.

Odd. They say he was leery of the Old World, afraid it would somehow dilute the American character of his art. He suffered periodic spells of painter’s block. Strange for an artist of such energy.

There is something manic about his art. Early works reek with a kind of hectic virtuosity and forced good humor. “Frankie the Organ Boy” is like a rapier duel with Frans Hals. Bellows wins but he seems to be restrained at that. The painting wants to be either a classic exercise in Manet-like detachment or a wallow in Expressionist Angst like a Soutine, but Bellows always hedges to the middle. “42 Kids” is a marvel of plein-air light and deft organization, but Bellows keeps it palatably picturesque rather than facing up to the serious social dislocation represented by the reality of these displaced urchins. It’s a little like looking at the immigrant waifs who live under L.A. freeways today and remarking that it’s “terribly interesting.”

None of this makes Bellows a bad artist or a bad guy. He was immensely gifted, observant, empathetic and compassionate, but something kept him from acting on the full implications of what was going on in the world around him--or the one inside him. Some kind of need to maintain a “balanced view” may have kept him from ever fully realizing his most authentic self. Or maybe he feared that self.

Or selves. There were at least two of him, the balanced classicist and the explosive romantic.

His portraits are usually well-painted. Those of old people are sometimes as moving as Hals’ late almshouse pictures. Usually, however, they have an odd emotional neutrality, even those of his beloved wife and daughters. Affection. Not much more.

His romantic temperament is most clearly seen in his landscapes and city views. His “Excavation at Night” is an apocalyptic vision of a world about to implode. In a series of dark visions of rocks and cliffs like “Evening Swell,” Bellows takes the Conrad-like sensibility of Winslow Homer, a giant step toward the subjective demons of Edvard Munch.

Contrasting these lowering images, seascapes in ever-brighter colors are virtually ecstatic in capturing nature’s rhythmic energies effortlessly in paint. Looking, we think this guy would have made a hell of an abstract artist. One spends a lot of time looking at Bellows and thinking he would have been a great Degas or Gauguin or a fine Eakins or neat surrealist like Ivan Albright. If only he’d let go. Or hang on. Instead, he just worked away, rattled. It shows in the results. Passages go out of whack.

In a rare story revealing his inner life, Bellows once recounted his rapture in climbing a high promontory where he realized he could have very easily just jumped.

This somewhat manic-depressive romantic is probably what attracted him to the discipline of various theories of color and composition. The period was full of people looking for ideological answers to give their worlds stability.

Maybe theory helped Bellows keep his balance. For all the things that puzzle and sometimes dismay us in the work, it adds up to a movingly real triumph of a man achieving grace under pressure.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., to May 10. Closed Mondays. (213) 857-6000.