American painter and lithographer. He was the son of George Bellows, an architect and building contractor. He displayed a talent for drawing and for athletics at an early age. In 1901 he entered Ohio State University, where he contributed drawings to the school yearbook and played on both the basketball and the baseball teams. In the spring of his third year he withdrew from university to play semi-professional baseball until the end of summer 1904; this, and the sale of several of his drawings, earned him sufficient money to leave Columbus in September to pursue his career as an artist.
Bellows studied in New York under ROBERT HENRI at the New York School of Art, directed by William Merrit Chase. He initially resided at the YMCA on 57th Street. In 1906 Bellows moved to Studio 616 in the Lincoln Arcade Building on Broadway; over the following years the other tenants at this location included the urban realist painter Glenn O. Coleman (1887–1932), Rockwell Kent and the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Across from Bellows’s studio was the Sharkey Athletic Club, the setting for one of Bellows’s most famous paintings, Stag at Sharkey’s (1909; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.), two fighters painted from the memory of a bout Bellows had witnessed there.
Although prizefighting where admission was charged was illegal in New York at this time, certain ‘prizefighting clubs’ such as Sharkey’s circumvented the law by charging a club membership fee to view the fights. The promoter’s way around the illicit nature of prizefighting is satirized in the title of another of Bellows’s early paintings on this theme, Both Members of this Club (1909; Washington, DC, N.G.A.). His early paintings are executed in a tonal palette of primarily creams and browns scumbled by streaks of white, with the vigorous broadly stroked brushwork characteristic of the work of Henri and his students. They evoke the smoky, dark, illicit crowded space of the ring and capture the tawdry underworld flavour associated with these ‘prizefighting clubs’ at the turn of the century.
In 1916 Bellows installed a lithography press in his studio and began producing lithographs with the printer George C. Miller (1892–1964). He became less interested in brushwork and more interested in pictorial structure (e.g., lithograph, Stag at Sharkey’s, 1917). In some of his lithographs he satirized the physical improvement concerns of white-collar businessmen, at a time when President Roosevelt was promoting the ‘strenuous life’ for American males, for example Businessmen’s Class, YMCA (lithograph, 1916; Ann Arbor, U. MI Mus. A.) and Shower Bath (lithograph, 1917; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.). He began to treat the human figure more simply and geometrically and to experiment with composition. SOURCE (Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T007720?q=george+bellows&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit) Accessed, December 5th, 2016)
