Issued: January 2011
3 March – 30 May 2011
Room 1
Admission Free
This spring the National Gallery hosts a small exhibition of 12 paintings that have never been seen before in the United Kingdom. 'An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters' introduces visitors to Bellows and his artist friends (William Glackens, George Luks, John Sloan and their teacher Robert Henri), and to an important moment in the history of American painting.
The Ashcan School was formed at the beginning of the 20th century as American painters, principally in New York City and Philadelphia, began to develop a uniquely American point of view on the beauty, violence and velocity of the modern world – and a new way to represent them. The most familiar reading of the Ashcan painters is as urban realists who embraced the brutal but vivid life of the city as their subject and found stark visual language through which to communicate their realities to a contemporary audience (John Sloan, 1907, 'Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street', Philadelphia Museum of Art).
The most prominent member of the group was George Bellows. Usually discussed as an artist of the city, often depicting urban parks, Bellows also enjoyed painting landscapes away from the metropolis. The American master of snow, Bellows seems to offer engagement with the natural world as the main subject of his paintings ('The Palisades', 1909, Daniel J. Terra Collection, Chicago).
'An American Experiment' contains seven paintings by Bellows; four of these are scenes of New York State and will be hung together along one wall of Room 1. 'Blue Snow, The Battery' (1910, Columbus Museum of Art) depicts the 25-acre public park immediately adjacent to Wall Street at the tip of Lower Manhattan. The bustling Port of New York and New Jersey lies nearby but little of it is evident. Rather, the city is shrouded in snow and it seems as if sounds are muted.
However, Bellows did paint the urban construction of New York City and 'Excavation at Night' (1908, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas) is one of a series of images Bellows made of the building work at the site of Pennsylvania Station. This picture has a long art-historical lineage behind it, recalling the paintings of light-in-darkness by the 18th-century artist Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’. Bellows’s early 20th-century version capitalises on the compositional and aesthetic means developed by the artists of the sublime, like Wright and Turner, to describe the urban scene.
In the 1910s Bellows increasingly embraced non-urban subject matter, and he spent considerable time on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. Here he painted one of his most audacious images, 'The Big Dory' (1913, New Britain Museum of American Art), which anticipates the stylisations of Art Deco a generation later, and reflects the radical avant-garde European influences the artist had recently been absorbing.
The Ashcan painters were part of a widespread interest in the quality of life in the modern cities of the early 20th century. Along with British artists like Walter Sickert, they are representative of a strong analysis of urban experience while owing much to Old Masters such as Velázquez and Manet.
For press information please contact Eloise Maxwell at eloise.maxwell@ng-london.org.uk / 020 7747 2420
Organisation
'An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters' is curated by Christopher Riopelle, Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, and Katherine Bourguignon, Associate Curator at the Terra Foundation for American Art.
This exhibition is organised by the National Gallery in partnership with and through major support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The National Gallery and the Terra Foundation for American Art are collaborating to bring historical masterworks from the United States to audiences in London through a series of focused exhibitions, to be presented over the next several years.
Established in 1978, the Terra Foundation for American Art is dedicated to fostering the exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States. With financial resources of more than $200 million and an exceptional collection of American art from the colonial era to 1945, it is one of the leading foundations focused on American art, and devotes approximately $9 million annually in support of American art exhibitions, projects, and research worldwide. For information on initiatives and opportunities for support, please visit www.terraamericanart.org.
Publication
'An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters'
By David Peters Corbett with Katherine Bourguignon and Christopher Riopelle
An accessible, fully illustrated introduction to the American Ashcan painters, exploring key characteristics of their work in gritty scenes of urban life, landscapes and portraits.
David Peters Corbett is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia. He has worked on American art of this period, as holder of the Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2008–10) and as Terra Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. (2009–10). Katherine Bourguignon is Associate Curator, Terra Foundation for American Art. Christopher Riopelle is Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London.
Dates and opening hours
Open to public: 3 March – 30 May 2011
Open daily 10am–6pm, Friday until 9pm
Admission
Free
Images
Publicity images for An American Experiment can be obtained from
http://press.ng-london.org.uk. To obtain a username please contact the National Gallery Press Office on 020 7747 2865 or e-mail press@ng-london.org.uk
For further press information please contact 020 7747 2885 or information@ng-london.org.uk