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.

In Facing Facts, David Shi provides the most comprehensive history to date of the rise of realism in American culture. He vividly captures the character and sweep of this all-encompassing movement - ranging from Winslow Homer to the rise of the Ash Can school, from Whitman to Henry James to Theodore Dreiser. He begins with a look at the antebellum years, when idealistic themes were considered the only fit subject for art (Hawthorne wrote that "the grosser life is a dream, and the spiritual life is a reality"). Whitman's assault on these otherworldly standards coincided with sweeping changes in American society: the bloody Civil War, the aggressive advance of a modern scientific spirit, the emergence of photography and penny newspapers, the expansion of cities, capitalism, and the middle class - all worked to shake the foundations of genteel idealism and sentimental romanticism. The public developed an ever-expanding appetite for concrete facts and for art that accurately depicted them. As Shi proceeds through the nineteenth century, he traces the realist impulse in each major area of arts and letters, combining an astute analysis of the movement's essential themes with incisive portraits of its leading practitioners. Here we see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., shaken to stern realism by the horrors of the Civil War; the influence of Walt Whitman on painter Thomas Eakins and architect Louis Sullivan, a leader of the Chicago school; the local-color verisimilitude of Louisa May Alcott and Sarah Orne Jewett; and the impact of urban squalor on intrepid young writers such as Stephen Crane. In the process of surveying nineteenth-century cultural history, Shi provides fascinating insights into thespecific concerns of the realist movement - in particular, the nation's growing obsession with gender roles. Realism, he observes, was in part an effort to revive masculine virtues in the face of effeminate sentimentality and decorous gentility. By the end of the nineteenth century, realism had displaced idealism as the dominant approach in thought and the arts. During the next two decades, however, a new modernist sensibility challenged the fact-devouring emphasis of realism: "Is it not time", one critic asked, "that we renounce the heresy that it is the function of art to record a fact?" Shi examines why so many Americans answered yes to this question, under influences ranging from psychoanalysis to the First World War. Nuanced, detailed, and comprehensive, Facing Facts provides the definitive account of the realist phenomenon, revealing its essential causes, explaining why it played so great a role in American cultural history, and suggesting why it retains its perennial fascination.