At a meeting of the National Arts Club in New York City in 1918,
the venerated printmaker Joseph Pennel addressed club members on the topic of lithography in his youth.
Several decades earlier, Pennel had been a protege of Whistler, and from that master he had learnt not only the print maker's art,
but also Whistler famously called the gentle art of making enemies.
On this occasion, Pennel took took the opportunity to spray to rival 25 years his junior,
the painter George Bellows, who had recently entered the field of printmaking with alarming success.
The point at issue was authenticity. Pennel insisted.
Hi. Come in. Pennel insisted that artists should only paint or draw what they can observe.
No direct face to face encounter.
He denied that a true artist could, quote, could ever, with any safety, see and experience beyond the actual fact before him.
With this, he wants to swipe at Bellows, who is in attendance that evening.
The older artists singled out Bellows, much praised new oil painting showing the death of Edith Cavel,
the British Red Cross nurse executed by a German firing squad in 1915.
Bella's had based his painting on a lithographic drawing. All right.
On a lithographic drawing he had completed several months earlier. If Mr. George Bello is, Pennel announced,
had been himself present at the death at the execution of Edith Cavill and had seen the whole thing with his own eyes,
he would have painted a far more authentic picture than the one he made up out of his head.
And before telling you what what Bello said in reply, I should point out that this was a very strange comment to come from Joseph Pennel,
who in that same year, 1918, produced what is certainly the most apocalyptic visual image to circulate in America during the First World War.
Clearly, it, too, is a construct of the artist's imagination. It envisions a decapitated Statue of Liberty.
Her headline, Half submerged in New York Harbour while enemy warplanes bombed Manhattan into a seething cauldron of smoke and flame.
Two million prints. This poster circulated throughout the land and seised Americans with dread and
indignation at the almost inconceivable idea of an airstrike on Manhattan.
No, Bela's replied to panel. I was not present at the murder of Edith Cavel.
Neither so far as I'd been able to learn. Was Leonardo present at the Last Supper.
The appeal here is to a higher order of representation. The mere eyewitness literalism Bellows is.
Supporters cheered his witticism, which was much repeated because it linked their man to the great Renaissance master.
Who was at once a careful scientific observer of natural phenomena and an inspired visionary,
one who never allowed the limitations of time and space to rein him in.
There's something theological about bellows his remark and not simply because he alludes to the most famous religious painting of Western art.
The theology inheres in the romantic view that the inner eye can see reality more clearly than the outer one does.
That artistic inspiration trumps empirical fact gathering.
And that in the making of true art, neither the hand nor the eye nor the brain of the artist ranks as high as the heart.
The Bellows and his admirers would take to this lofty ground and the fact in the face of Pennells criticism is nonetheless surprising.
Bellows, after all, more than any other American artist of his era, was celebrated for his skills as a visual journalist.
An eyewitness reporter of the seamy side of life as seen in images such as these.
One of which shows three homeless men inspecting a rancid scrap of meat retrieved from a garbage can.
The other, the execution of a prison inmate by recently invented technology of state dispense death.
The electric chair. His most famous picture, Stag at Sharkey's from 1989 makes a direct allusion to his self-appointed role as a witness.
It shows the head of the balding painter on the lower right hand side.
That's him beneath the arm of the referee, peering over the edge of the ring.
Everybody got him. Going don't have a pointer.
So the position suggests an analogy between two types of canvas, the kind on which boxers box and that on which painters paint.
Indeed, the self-portrait serves as an artist's signature and proudly declares, I was there.
I saw this event with my own eyes. In the days before World War One, Bellows was America's Gustaaf Corps Bay,
a sharp eyed observer of working class life and labour who had no truck with sentimental bourgeois idealism.
Here I am comparing Corps Base The Stone Breakers from 1849 with Bela's as Blue Morning from nineteen oh
nine and a ferial and yet gritty depiction of manual labour during the construction of a railway station.
When asked to paint an angel for a mural in a church, Courbet had facetiously replied,
I have never seen an angel show me an angel and I will paint you one in principle, Bellows agreed.
In 1918, however, he changed his mind about such matters, and with Edith Cavel, he painted his angel his nation now at war.
He turned to a different 19th century master for inspiration. He exchanged Courbet for Goya, adding, as the Spanish artist did.
Elements of the fantastic two. His depiction of modern life.
And these are both GooYa images, especially because Bela's did not have the opportunity to see the fighting in Europe firsthand.
He was compelled by circumstances to forsake the eyewitnessed ethos.
He did, after all, make an effort to join the army and see action at the front.
But at 36, he was rejected because of his age, unable to bear arms against the Germans.
He fought them with chalk and paintbrush instead.
His change of heart with regard to the war, as well as to his role as an artist observer, shocked some of his associates.
We can understand this when we consider his earlier political leanings.
After leaving Columbus, Ohio for New York in 1984 to seek his fortune as an artist,
the young Bellows had embraced the Greenwich Village version of socialism and art.
Anarchism that historians have dubbed the lyrical left a version of leftism congenial to artists, poets and professors.
The raw, muscular, energetic brand of urban realist painting The Bela's Perfected was an amalgamation of Core Bay Manet and Jacob Reise,
The Turn of the Century documentary photographer of New York City's Poor Here,
along with two photographs by Reese from about a decade earlier, we see Bela's paintings, 42 kids from nineteen oh seven and cliff dwellers from 1913.
The painters visual verve perfectly suited the lyrical left.
The house organ of the lyrical left was a lively and controversial illustrated monthly magazine called The Masses.
It featured art, poetry, fiction and political reporting by the era's leading left wing artists,
intellectuals and activists as seen in the cartoons and magazine covers assembled here.
Bellows was amongst them. When hostilities broke out in Europe in 1914, the magazine unleashed a torrent of editorials,
cartoons and opinion pieces denouncing the imperialist origins of the war and redock,
ridiculing the self-righteous bankers,
clergymen and press appearance on both sides of the Atlantic who profited shamelessly from the war's continuation.
Having their fling, showing the capitalists is basically they're all fat capitalists or clergymen celebrating the war.
Profit making the war, although Bela's, unlike many of his fellow socialists, did not actively impose U.S. intervention in the conflict.
He worried that it would lead to the curtailment, if not downright suppression of democratic civil liberties.
Still, I think it's safe to say that during the Build-Up to the war and even in his first days, Bela's was not a super patriot.
And as he was not keen on going to war in this, he was quite unlike the pro-war activists child Hassam, who,
together with the aforementioned Joseph Pennel, hailed from an earlier generation and a more privileged social class and like panel.
He was Bellos, his artistic nemesis. You're welcome, Simon.
Here I show you Hazard's 1917 impressionist painting.
Early morning on the avenue in May 1917, the avenue in question being Fifth Avenue at Fifty Fourth Street,
with flags of the allied nations dancing beneficent Ali across the skyline.
Haslam's uptown views of Manhattan are altogether different from those of bellows such as New York from six years earlier 1911.
Bela's his depiction of a downtown square is dense with crowds thick with pigment, laden with atmosphere.
The paint handling like Mean Streets it depicts is rough, muscular and abrasive.
Bellows insists on the multiclass, multi-ethnic, multi layered nature of New York and by extension, America itself.
Haslam's intent much the opposite is to celebrate unity, homogeneity and social order.
Indeed, early morning on the avenue, painted at the dawn of America's entry into the war,
could even be understood as retort against Bellows as 1913 painting cliff dwellers where it's not
ceremonial flags of America and its allies that snap in the breeze over the heads of pedestrians,
but rather the laundry of immigrants from around the world.
Hassam, who was a staunch advocate, a staunch preparedness advocate, began making patriotic flag paintings in 1916.
About a year before America went to war. Bellows at that time treated war mongering satirically.
A drawing that he first published in a West Coast anarchist magazine and then sent to the masses for wider circulation,
depicts Jesus as a convict, manacled, clad in prison stripes bound by ball and chain.
The Prince of Peace has been jailed for preaching the seditious words Thou shalt not kill during wartime.
Blessed are the peacemakers, as the drawing is called appeared in the Monthly's issue for July 1917.
Bellows was looking closely at. In those days at Goya's early 19th century series of etchings known collectively as the Disasters of War,
which had recently been exhibited in New York.
And note how Christ in chains in this in his drawing echoes the stooped posture of the Spanish insurgent tied to an execution post in play.
Fifteen of the disasters.
Under the newly legislated Sedition Act, the July 1917 issue of the masses was barred by the Postal Service from being circulated by mail.
This blockage eventually resulted in the demise of the publication,
and several of Bela's his fellow artist illustrators were threatened with prosecution for their more incendiary imagery,
such as the notorious to a show here in one,
the Prince of Peace faces execution by an international firing squad comprised of soldiers representing the major combat nations in the other.
This is the one that particularly outraged people. A skeleton measures a young Army recruit for his coffin.
This was deemed particularly offensive by authorities who considered it a direct challenge to military conscription.
The artists had to flee to Mexico. Bellows, however, was not threatened with jail time, nor was he radicalised,
as were other members of Elev Lyrical left by the heavy handedness of the wartime government.
To the contrary, he became increasingly pro-war in his attitude, enraged by reports of German atrocities that streamed across the Atlantic.
In keeping with his commitment to artistic activism against cruelty, corruption and injustice,
as seen in the numerous political cartoons and social satires he had contributed over the years to the masses and other leftist publications,
including Blessed Are the Peacemakers. He felt the need to take a stand.
Breaking ranks with his anti-war Conrads, some of whom never forgave him for it.
He announced his support for American intervention. It was at this point that he volunteered for combat service and was turned down.
His subsequent campaign of art against the enemy is extraordinary in its ferocity, with Goya's disasters of war as his model.
He feverish.
Lee churned out a series of lithographs that describe in ghastly detail the German army's march through neutral Belgium in the late summer of 1914,
raping, pillaging and torturing civilians whose insurgency they sought to contain.
When these lithographs were exhibited in late 1918, a reviewer described them as, quote, brutal.
Full of horror but reeking with truth, which adds to their poignancy.
The artist's primary source of inspiration was the Brice Committee report, which appeared in May 1915.
Viscount James Bryce, former British ambassador to the United States and a member of the international court at The Hague,
headed up a war crimes commission that took depositions from twelve thousand twelve hundred witnesses and studied
the captured war diaries of German combatants to determine the truth of allegations against the occupiers.
The 61 page report makes for excruciating reading all the more so because the matter of fact manner in which it is written,
printed in 30 languages and sold in the US for 10 cents a copy.
The document was readily available and widely circulated.
Less than a week after the sinking of the Lusitania, as reported here on the front page, The New York Times on May eight, 1915.
Less than a week later, that newspaper devoted three full pages to an abridgement of the Brice report.
It doesn't take training in critical research methods to question its rigour, names of witnesses are withheld in respect for their privacy.
But without proper attribution, some of the more fantastic claims seemed like hearsay were outright invention.
After the war, the Bryce Report was subjected to scathing criticism,
and it has even been blamed for causing rumours of the Nazi mistreatment of Jews in the 1930s.
To be scoffed at as exaggerations by those who wish to avoid those who wished to avoid being duped again by government and news media propaganda.
Nonetheless, contemporary scholarship.
Scholarship today indicates that despite its flaws and probable exaggerations, the Bryce Report was essentially accurate.
The German occupiers did commit atrocities of the type and gravity described.
Now I have to say again, this is controversial and people are debating this.
To this day, at least seven of Belize's were lithographs show how he imagined crimes outlined in Brice works of technical finesse,
informal beauty with rich gradations of tone and dynamic compositions.
They attract the eye, but punish it for what it sees. One Belgium farmyard depicts a dark outdoor setting where a German soldier pulling on his
clothes stands over the supine body of a young female whom he has raped in the last victim.
Three lowish Germans loose German soldiers in a middle class parlour stare hungrily
at a distraught young woman who has entered the room to discover her mother,
father and brother sprawled dead or dying on the floor. The corresponding passage in Brice report declares, quote,
An air of some 50 men escaping from the burning houses were seised taken outside and shot at Malen, a hamlet west of F.
Forty men were shot in one household alone. The father and mother.
Their names withheld. Were shot. The daughter died after being repeatedly outraged.
And the son was wounded. These are amongst the more reportorial of Bela's, as were lithographs.
Others in the series seemed downright phantasmagoric in the back and all.
For example, the back. An owl, for example, depicts German soldiers guzzling wine in the open space of a village.
While guards bring in a young mother whose hands are bound tightly behind her,
a couple of small naked children have been impaled on Barnetts and are being waved in the air.
But no one takes notice. As if this were a common everyday experience.
According to one of Brice's unidentified witnesses, a drunken German soldier in the town of Marleen,
quote, drove his Bhanot with both hands into a child's stomach,
lifting the child into the air on his band net and carrying it away on his band that he and his comrades still singing.
Here, Bela's has combined two common themes in northern Renaissance painting the massacre
of the innocents and the indifference of soldiers who torture holy martyrs.
But he's updated the costumes and setting. In quite strong, the England.
England. England. God punishes England.
German soldiers now captured allied soldiers to doors made of rough wooden planks while a crowd looks on and jeers in the cigarette.
A solitary soldier seated in the shadows on the right side of the image scowls while smoking on the left,
the corpse of a man sags in a window frame beside a broken shattered in the centre, Incan death incandescently lit.
A naked woman writhes in agony and shame.
Her left arm, drenched in blood, extends high above her head, a spike driven through the palm to fastened her to the wall.
A gaping hole where her left breast should be indicates that the smoker has torn it from her body.
Bryce does not specifically describe this incident, but provide several accounts of sexual mutilation.
As, for example, two young women were lying in the backyard of the house.
One had her breasts cut off. The other had been stabbed.
Could such nightmarish events really have occurred, or was Bellows famously plunging into the depths of sadomasochistic fantasy, if not his own,
than that of the collective unconscious as it periodically bubbled up in the martyred same
paintings of the old masters as here in Sebastiano as martyrdom of Saint Agatha from 15 19.
As already mentioned, Goya's disasters of war etchings provided Bela's with the most compelling
antecedent for his febrile imaginings of corporeal distress and dismemberment.
So these are both Bela's from Syria. I mean, Guedes.
That the Germans systematically committed atrocities against civilians cannot be disputed in war time, rape, pillage and murder are common.
But what about banning babies,
nailing prisoners to doors and cutting off the breasts of women Bello's believes were allowed himself to believe the worst of the enemy?
He wanted to bear witness to the torture and killing, even though he had not seen those with his own eyes.
It was an artist's responsibility, he insisted, to use the creative imagination to expose real world crime and injustice.
Even when his knowledge of those was only Second-Hand,
reversing standard artistic practise in which original paintings provide the source for lithographic copies.
Felt so strongly about the work that poured out of him in the spring of 1918 that he
set about turning five of his war lithographs into large and richly coloured oils.
The barricade, composed in the manner of a neoclassical frieze,
shows German troops firing from behind a human screen of naked civilians whose nudity symbolises their other vulnerability.
The most disturbing of the five paintings, The Return of the Useless,
alludes to the well-documented fact that the German occupiers had forced Belgian
non-combatants into slave labour on the French front in Belgium and in Germany itself.
When these prisoners became too weak and broken down to work productively, hence useless,
their captors shipped them home in boxcars, bathed in queasy red hues and theatrically lit.
The painting shows a frightened young blonde woman faltering out of the shadows of a cattle car interior,
which holds her sick and dying fellow passengers to her.
Left, our right. A German guard herds dishevelled, bloodied prisoners and to her right,
another guard stomps on a fallen young man and beats him with the butt of a rifle.
Stiff Okkult to look at this painting today without thinking the Holocaust that lay ahead.
Bellows may not have been an eyewitness to the sort of crimes he depicts to the crime he depicts.
But to judge from occurrences that became commonplace in Europe less than a generation later, he got the iconography of deportation just right.
Of the five paintings he made from his war lithographs. The most acclaimed, despite Joseph Pennells disparaging remarks was Edith Cavel.
Drawing on motifs borrowed from an array of sources, including old master religious art,
contemporary recruitment posters, the Broadway stage and the Hollywood melodrama,
Bela's gave viewers a heightened sense of the reality of the scene depicted by calling to mind other types of visual artefacts that are ready,
worked for him, worked for them as conveyors of truth about the external world.
Indeed, we might say that the painting privileges referential realism over eyewitness realism by referential realism.
I mean that it refers the viewer to other previously acquired data, visual and otherwise,
providing a sense of familiarity and rightness, hence authenticity to the scene depicted.
The execution of Nurse Kabal was one of the most widely publicised stories of Great War and in death.
Kabul became its iconic female victim at the time of her arrest by the Germans in 1915.
She was a 49 year old English Red Cross nurse supervising a hospital in Brussels.
The Germans accused her of secretly helping hundreds of wounded allied prisoners to escape into Holland.
She admitted to the charges against her and the Germans sentenced her to death despite a worldwide outcry for clemency.
A firing squad dispatched her at dawn on the morning of October 12, 1915.
Sir George Frampton's sculptural memorial was unveiled in St.
Martin Square in London on that date in 1920, directly across the National Portrait Gallery.
Experts in international law agreed that the Germans were well within their rights to execute Nurse Cavel.
But the wizards of British propaganda deserved a golden opportunity in her sentencing and made the most of it.
At least 28 books and pamphlets about her were issued in the period,
as well as commemorative coins and stamps and special illustrated press editions
and licence was occasionally made to envision her as a murdered young beauty.
Americans were particularly distressed by nurse cavils death, according to one historian of wartime propaganda.
Quote, She was middle class Americans made an aunt.
The profession of nursing is one for which Americans have only the greatest respect.
The Germans could not have outraged this country more if they had executed Florence Nightingale.
She was the ideal heroine given the relentless assault,
a provocative propaganda that circulated in America about the death of nurse
Kabul Bela's his depiction might have seemed especially real and authentic,
especially because of its low key, non sensationalist manner.
The artist chose, after all, to show the nurse neither dead nor dying, but rather in a quiet moment preceding execution.
In other words,
the depiction may have seemed real because it did not venture into the histrionic territory of previous images and depictions of the event.
Instead, Bellows shows nurse Cavel radiant in white,
stoically descending a prison staircase into a courtyard in which guards engage in nocturnal conversation or lose themselves in slumber.
The subject calls to mind. Old master scenes, martyrdom and salvation, such as Rafaela's Deliverance of St.
Peter from prison, in which a saintly figure withstands the oppressive darkness of captivity,
and Piero Della Francesca's resurrection with its sleeping guards.
And yet, even though the painting a Shu's melodrama, harking instead to the sort of stoicism.
Oh, I have a few of my students from this morning here. So you'll get this painting.
Heartening instead to the sort of stoicism memorably,
memorably embodied by Benjamin West's famous 18th century history painting Agrippina landing at Brown Diesem with the Ashes or Germanicus.
Despite that, it nonetheless, I would say,
described a sort of rebound energy from the most harrowing of the era's propaganda posters to well-known examples of These are El's with Young.
Remember Belgium and Fred Spears' in list? Composed in a vertical format.
The poster on the left silhouettes a pair of figures against a brownish green sky flecked with burning cinders on the low horizon,
a conflagration consumes a town somewhere in a mythical Belgium.
The silhouettes reveal a dance of opposition between a moth, a walrus moustached, spiked helmeted German soldier and the young pubescent girl.
He drags behind him, presumably with sexual intent.
The poster on the right shows a ghostly wreath like young mother sinking to the bottom of the sea with an infant cradled in her arms.
Bubbles rise from her lips, indicating she is not yet dead. And a fish floats by as an impassive onlooker.
Dark and murky. Grey, green and brown. The oceanic depths surrounding the mother and child.
Child viewers who required no supplementary text to understand the painting.
The pictures allusion to the sinking of the Lusitania.
Edith Cavel is not nearly as Directors' either of these in its appeal to the viewers emotions, but because viewers came to it already,
having seen posters like these which arouse their enmity against the Germans for desecrating female purity and innocence,
because that the Bella's painting could only ever have been seen by his contemporaries.
Against the backdrop of those other far more inflammatory images, figuratively, if not literally, it was framed by them.
I want to point to another implicit framing or enveloping of youth cavel this time by Bella's his own image,
making his 1919 painting the studio based on an earlier Christmas card lithograph
shows the Bellows family at home on Christmas morning a domestic idyll in progress.
The artist's two daughters play together in the lower right foreground. What to the left?
The artist paints a portrait of his wife, Emma. Various other members of the extended family occupy the middle ground and the mezzanine.
In Edith Cavel, Bellows transforms his cheery home on 19th Street into the dank Belgian prison where the British nurse was executed.
And he uses Emma Bellows, the mistress of his home and mother of his children, as the model for Miss Cavel.
Thus, we see that the war in Europe, which he could only no second hand, nonetheless resonated for him in a highly personal manner.
Shortly after bellows his untimely death in 1925,
one of his defenders excused the excesses of Bellows his war paintings by claiming that the art that artists, quote,
are able to visualise atrocities have more completely than most men can and thereby, quote,
He suffered from a kind of indwelling excitement during the war that disturbed artists to a point not yet admitted in print.
Bellows, the friend explains, came to refer to his war paintings as his hallucinations, but he was not ashamed of having drawn and painted them.
Later, champion of Bellows, my Henry Sharpe Young reminded his readers that the artist's fanatical outrage against the Germans was by no means unique.
Quote, This was not a private obsession. It was as contagious as Spanish flu for that generation.
The war was the end of the world and there was no doubt that it was the Germans fault.
According to Young, the artist's work was compromised by his participation in the orgy of animosity.
Quote, This was the most violent motion of his life. And it had a bad effect on his art.
His war pictures are the worst he ever painted. And this is like the great champion of billers in the 1930s.
The journalist Gilbert Selders, looking back at the earlier period, ruefully noted.
I now realise that we were told nothing but bunkum, that we were shown nothing of the realities of war, that we were, in short,
merely part of the great allied propaganda machine whose purpose was dis was to
sustain morale at all costs and help draw unwilling America into the slaughter.
To return to earlier in this talk, we need to ask ourselves who was ultimately right?
Joseph Pennel, who faulted Bellows for making things up, even though he too did so under the pressure of war.
Bellows, who claimed for himself a higher authority based on his empathetic response to atrocities.
He only read about. He only read about the vividly imagined and made.
Plasticky, real. I'm not answering that question for you.
I'm just posing. Once the war was over, large numbers of Americans, perhaps not a majority of them,
but quite a few nonetheless came to believe they had been bamboozled by government
sponsored misinformation that had been widely disseminated by artists and writers.
Bellows amongst them as the Bellow scholar Carol Troyen observes, quote,
The discrediting of the Brice report caused many Americans to feel that the bestiality of the Germans had been greatly exaggerated and that the
United States had been tricked and manipulated into entering the war because they placed so much emphasis on the Germans abuse of civilians.
Bela's war series came to be regarded as part of the deception.
By 1920, Bela's war images were largely largely withdrawn from view, and by the time of his sudden premature death,
five years later, they were considered an embarrassment, a stain on his reputation.
Only recently have they come again to the fore, perhaps as curiosities, fossils of a long vanished mindset.
On the other hand, today it is a new era of popular hysteria against enemies regarded as inhuman monsters.
They take on frightening relevance. As a matter of contrast.
Let us look at a nearly contemporaneous work by Bella's generation older countrymen.
The Anglo American portrait painter and landscape artist John Singer Sargent Sergeant
produced when the most poignant artistic images to come out of World War One,
an unusually large frieze like composition called gased.
Unlike any of Bela's his war paintings, this was based on firsthand observation under the auspices of the British War ARD office.
Sergeant had visited the front and been moved to see groups of blinded soldiers leaning on
one another for support as they proceeded to a field hospital with on his wry understatement.
The mature sergeant provides an account of war's devastation, and beyond that,
he puts forward a metaphore that could be understood as criticising the incompetence of political and military leadership.
War for sergeant is a matter of the blind leading the blind.
A point he makes clear with his allusion to the Flemish artist Peter Breugel is legendary 19th AR 15 50s painting of that title.
So, too, is an inescapable illusion there.
By comparison, Bellows, his reactions were brash and strident.
Those of an artist in early middle age who had already drifted past his greatest accomplishments as chronicler of the urban stage.
Sargent relied on firsthand observation,
a craft to craft a very detailed if someone allegorical view of war and its corrosive effects on the human spirit.
Bellows, it seems, was flailing, trying to recapture some lost spark, some naked honesty that had faded from his life.
With the coming of middle age material success, critical acclaim and a happy marriage, in my view,
he substituted polemical outrage for his earlier commitment to careful observation and clear eyed insight.
And this did not lead to a good result. His in his righteous indignation at atrocities that he read about but did not witness,
prompted him to imagine static in cartoon like depictions of violence.
These lack. On one hand, the raw, invigorating, vibrant beauty of his earlier New York City urban landscapes and the sharp,
incisive humour of his drawings, a metropolitan streetlife. To be sure, physical violence, brutality even was always a key component of Belize's work.
It's part of what makes him stand out today as the best,
the most viewable of the early 20th century American artists known collectively as the Ashcan School.
This is obviously apparent in his boxing paintings.
According to a friend from Columbus who reported a year after the artist died, he once remarked, I don't know anything about boxing.
I'm just painting two men trying to kill each other in his prime.
Bela's was great because his art epitomised a hammer blow against the so-called genteel tradition.
He was doing in the field of art something equivalent to what his one time roommate, Eugene O'Neill,
was doing in that realm of theatre, overturning its obsessive concern with social propriety and neatness of form.
The peak of Bela's is holy war, if you will. Unholy violence comes in his extraordinary series of excavation paintings in which the bowels of
Lower Manhattan are ripped open by men with sledgehammers and robotic earth devouring machines.
These are paintings of menacing beauty. And I just have to say, there's so much more beautiful than when these reproductions in this light give you.
They're quite raw and powerful, less overtly.
So his depictions of New York City winter are also laced with a terrible, violent beauty.
Take, for example, the lone tenement, a stunning architectural portrait of an isolated and dilapidated tenement building stranded
at the edge of an icy river and overshadowed by the rusty span of an iron bridge.
While puny, ill clad figures little more than urban ciphers huddled for warmth around small fires in the snow.
The brushwork shows Bellows as best as a pugilist with a paintbrush slashing and jabbing at the canvas with a flurry of bold, decisive strokes.
Other urban landscapes, such as rain on the river, were even the at first glance anodyne blue snow.
The battery ring. Extraordinary beauty from tumultuous brushwork, harsh colour contrasts.
And in the latter, painting the eye assaulting glare of bright sun on crisp white snow.
But these are only violent in an implied or metaphoric way, having to do with the cacophonous rhythms of life in the big city.
They were stylistically violent as well, at least in the eyes of genteel viewers more accustomed to bland urban imagery.
The war series, however, is overtly, even hyperbolically violent with these works.
Belo set aside his commitment to eyewitnessed realism because his greater goal was to shake Americans out of their moral lethargy and force them.
As the title of a book by Susan Sontag puts it, to regard the pain of others.
Sontag remarks of Goya's war etchings quote that the atrocities perpetuated by the French soldiers in Spain didn't happen exactly as pictured.
Hardly disqualifies the disasters of war. Goya's images are a synthesis.
They claim things like this happened. Belize's war images do the same.
Does that justify them? In his case, what was gained and what was lost by his imagining atrocities he could not verify.
Drawing on unreliable sources and thereby playing into the hands of the propaganda machine, the job of a writer or an artist,
Sontag observes, quote, is not to have opinions, but to tell the truth and to refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation.
Similary. Similarly, Ernest Hemingway once said a writer's job is to tell the truth.
His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention of
his experience should produce a truer account than anything factual can be.
He continues, for facts can be observed badly.
But when a good writer or artist is creating something, he has time and scope to make of it an absolute truth.
Edith Cavel demonstrates a level of tranquillity of non-violence that sets it apart from the overheated atrocity lithographs,
the bellows made under the influence of Goya, images that a Bela's admirer later apologetically characterised as, quote, reckless emotionalism.
The painting of Kaval approaching her death has an eerie cast to it.
A sickly grey green tint gives the viewer an anxious, queasy feeling.
Three types of nocturnal lighting suffused the image the harsh yellow flare of gas lanterns which rhythmically stab out of the shadows,
the aethereal glow moonlight behind the stone stone archway in the upper right corner,
and the beatific radiance of nurse Cavel as she calmly descends the staircase toward her martyrdom.
Here Bellows, a painter of modern life who is by turns romantic, sardonic,
satiric and hotheaded steps back from the tendentious politics of his other,
more polemical war imagery to produce a complex rumination on the nature of bravery and self-possession in a world of stone cold indifference.
Instead of attacking the Germans as subhuman sadists and thus forsaking artistic truth for a roundhouse swing at the enemy of the day,
Bela's uses them as markers of life that goes on in its crude, unremarkable way while suffering occurs unnoticed in its midst.
The painting is about war, yes, but much more than war in Sontag's terms.
It is not an opinion piece. It is a meditation on suffering on selfhood at the moment of extinction.
In that regard, it is one of the most truthful of Belize's short, the one most truthful works of Bela's, a short, brilliant and tempestuous career.
In the end, Bela's is Belgium was a construct of his imagination.
This construct was due in large part to British propagandists who distorted and exploited German misdeeds for political gain and also,
of course, by the Germans themselves who authorised criminal behaviour against the civilian Belgian civilians.
If we look for verifiable truth in these paintings, drawings, lithographs will not find it.
But perhaps they bring other levels of truth to the fore. Let's end by juxtaposing two famous quotations from the era.
Both of them issued not long after the war was over.
One is from the British politician Arthur Ponsonby, who published a post-war diatribe against propaganda, which he entitled Falsehood in Wartime.
When war is declared, writes Ponsonby, truth is the first casualty.
To this, he adds, there must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world's history.
The other quotation is from Bela's is contemporary Pablo Picasso, who observed, Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.
As we've seen this afternoon, Bela's is incendiary. War pictures fall somewhere into the abyss that separates these two comments in our
world today in which civilian populations are again subject to extreme brutality.
It's hard to know now. It's it's hard to know now, as it was back then, how to work our way through this abyss.
Who to listen to, whose word to trust in which course of action we as individuals and as a collective society
can take without ultimately doing ourselves and those we wish to save more harm than good.
Belize's his drawings and paintings of wartime atrocities. In Belgium a little more than a century ago are worth resurrecting for.
They remind us all too clearly how unclear things become in the wake of war.
Rather than condemn him for his blind acceptance of the atrocity reports with their difficult to disentangle, blend of fact and prevarication,
let us ask ourselves how easily we too,
in the present day can be duped by news and fake news and wars and rumours of wars and information and misinformation.
Bellows is us in this regard. An early victim of large scale, systematic and lethal fact bending.
We need somehow to find a better way than he had to dedicate ourselves to that ever elusive and yet absolutely indispensable entity known as truth.
Thank you very much.