Excavating New York: George Bellows's Landscapes of Modernity

This dissertation centers on George Bellows's paintings of New York City and its environs during the early years of the twentieth century. It is structured around the question of what it meant to be a painter in the ascendant age of mechanical reproductions. I argue that Bellows reworked the conventions of new media such as film, photojournalism, and popular illustration, as well as the traditions of American landscape painting, to reckon with the upheavals of the modern city. Each chapter focuses on a group of paintings, a geographic location, and a different aspect of the contemporary visual culture. Chapter One examines two depictions of the center of the city, New York, 1911, and Blue Morning, 1909, and considers them in relation to the culture of early film. In these works, Bellows adopted and transformed cinema's strategies of display and heightened, spectacular representation of reality. Chapter Two looks at Bellows's scenes of the edge of the city as a reworking of the American landscape tradition at the moment when the metropolis was supplanting the countryside as the locus of national and artistic identity. Chapter Three focuses on the artist's paintings of the Penn Station excavation in the context of popular photojournalism. These works served as Bellows's attempt to preserve historical memory and subjective interpretation in a city that was understood to value progress above all else. Finally, Chapter Four examines the artist's late Woodstock landscapes and boxing pictures. It argues that he developed structures of distanced viewership and employed motifs derived from popular children's illustrations to withdraw from the concerns of the modern city. This dissertation is an examination of a group of paintings commonly seen as ancillary to the modernist canon, but which in fact engages with modernity in ways that challenge the traditional narrative of the period. Bellows stands at the intersection of two critical moments: the rise of New York as an international modern city, and the seeming decline of realism as a vital form of artistic production. This study shows how these stories are intertwined, and not simply inverse reflections of one another.