A comprehensive, lavishly illustrated book about one of America's finest 20th-century painters. With more than 200 reproductions (75 in full color), The Paintings of George Bellows offers new insights into Bellows' finest works on canvas and into the bold and thoughtful artist who created them.

Art Catalog for George Bellows Exhibit being held at the Memorial Art Gallery in Spring 2003.

George Bellows's spirited and virile paintings of New York in the early decades of the twentieth century celebrated the city's bigness and bolness. Although these works clearly challenged the conservative practices of the National Academy and linked Bellows with the anti-academic art of Robert Henri and the Eight, they were highly popular, even with arch-conservatives. In this book Marianne Doezema explores why it was that Bellows's paintings--despite being considered coarse in technique and subject matter--were acclaimed by critics and patrons, by conservatives, progressives, and radicals alike. Doezema focuses on three of Bellows's principal urban themes: the excavation for Pennsylvania Station, prizefights, and tenement life on the Lower East Side. Drawing on journals and periodicals of the period, she discusses how the prominent, often newsworthy motifs painted by Bellows evoked particular associations and meanings for his contemporaries. Arguing that the implicit message of these paintings was distinctly unrevolutionary, she shows that the excavation paintings celebrated industrialization and urbanization, the boxing pictures presented the sport as brutal and its fans as bloodthirsty, and the depictions of the Lower East Side conformed to a moralistic, middle-class view of poverty. In many of Bellows's subject pictures of this era, says Doezema, the artist approached issues of changing moral and social values in a way that not only seemed congenial to many members of his audience but also verified their attitudes and preconceptions about urban life in America.

A leading member of the Ashcan school of artists, George Bellows (1882-1925) was a master of realism, noted for his vivid brush strokes and his canvasses full of motion. This book includes his signature paintings of urban life, a selection of portraits, his lesser-known landscapes and his portrayals of prizefighters and other athletes in action.

Since his death in 1925, the country's most significant collections of American painting have granted George Bellows a place among their most important artists. Best known for a relatively small number of controversial boxing images, he is equally notable for his contributions to American landscape painting, portraiture, and especially scenes of modern American life. Although his talent is most directly evident in his drawings, until now they have been paid only cursory attention. The Powerful Hand of George Bellows features drawings and related lithographs by the great American realist George Bellows. It describes for the first time the ingenious combinations of graphic media Bellows used to create them. It also details the circumstances under which he made them and the specifics of his active career as a commercial artist and cartoonist underlying his more celebrated role as a painter. Recorded in these drawings is a new understanding of the meteoric course along which his talents carried him.