December 22 1913 Volume 1 Number 45 the Mentor Makers of American Art Department of Fine Arts

Forty-two Kids was painted in Baronial 1907 [fig. 1] [fig. ane] Entry from artist'south Record Book almost 40-2 Kids, The Ohio State University Libraries' Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio , less than 3 years after George Wesley Bellows had left his domicile state of Ohio at the age of 22 to study art in New York City. [1] [1]
The August 1907 date of completion for Forty-two Kids is recorded in Bellows's Record Volume (Record Volume A, p. 39). Thanks to Glenn Peck for providing a copy of the Record Book folio (see fig. i). This entry is a revised version of text that was originally published in Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945, ed. Sarah Cash (Washington, DC, 2011). He enrolled at the New York Schoolhouse of Art under Robert Henri, the artist and influential teacher effectually whom congregated the so-called Ashcan schoolhouse of urban realists. Bellows fully subscribed to his mentor's credo, creating work "full of vitality and the actual life of the time." [ii] [ii]
"George Bellows, an Artist with 'Red Blood,'" Current Literature 53, no. 3 (Sept. 1912): 342. Forty-ii Kids exemplifies Bellows's early piece of work, much of which depicts metropolitan anecdotes, including the illegal boxing matches for which he would become best known.

In Forty-2 Kids, nude and partially clothed boys appoint in a multifariousness of antics—swimming, diving, sunbathing, smoking, and peradventure urinating—on and near a dilapidated wharf jutting out over New York City's Due east River [fig. 2] [fig. two] Metropolis children—bathing for gratuitous at the Battery, New York City, 1908/1916, photograph, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Partition . [three] [iii]
The setting is established past a letter from Bellows'south widow, Emma, to Marian Rex, Jan. 23, 1959, NGA curatorial files. The wharf is painted with broad, fluid strokes from a heavily laden paintbrush, and the "little scrawny-legged kids in their naively indecent movements" are sketched with Bellows's characteristic vigor and economy of means. [4] [iv]
Philip L. Unhurt, "Boston Fine art Shown in Philadelphia," Boston Herald, January. 26, 1908, Special sec., 1. The vague grid formed by the wharf's rough-hewn planks provides a stable compositional platform for the jumble of "spindle-shanked little waifs" distributed seemingly at random across the foreground and heart ground of the canvas. [5] [5]
Charles L. Buchanan, "George Bellows: Painter of Republic," Arts and Decoration iv, no. 10 (Aug. 1914): 371.

Forty-two Kids elicited significant attention when it was get-go exhibited. It was recognized as "one of the most original and vivacious canvases" at the National Academy of Design's 1908 exhibition, [six] [six]
New York Herald, quoted in Charles H. Morgan, George Bellows: Painter of America (New York, 1965), 83. where Bellows won the 2nd-place Julius Hallgarten Prize for another painting, North River (1908, Pennsylvania University of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia). [7] [7]
The Julius Hallgarten Prize was bestowed annually from 1884 to three domestically based American artists under the age of 35. This was only the 2d year Bellows had submitted to the academy. It was an auspicious sign; in April 1909, the organization inducted Bellows as one of the youngest academicians in its history.

Although it was viewed with "a pleasurable sensation" and relished for its "humour" and "humanity," [8] [8]
John Cournos, "Three Painters of the New York School," International Studio 56, no. 224 (Oct. 1915): 244; and James Gibbons Huneker, "The Spring Academy: Second Notice," New York Lord's day, March 21, 1908, 6. Forty-two Kids did non receive universally positive reviews. One critic condemned it for "the most inexcusable errors in cartoon and full general proportions," [nine] [ix]
Maude I. M. Oliver, "Art News of the Week," Chicago Record-Herald, November 8, 1908, sec. six, 5. while another denounced it as "a tour de forcefulness in absurdity." [ten] [10]
Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, "An Excellent Academy Show," New York Evening Post, March 14, 1908, 6. It had been controversially denied the prestigious Lippincott Prize at the Pennsylvania University's 1908 annual exhibition owing to the jury'south fearfulness that the donor might be offended by the championship and bailiwick of the painting. [11] [xi]
The jury had originally voted 8 to 2 in favor of awarding Forty-two Kids the Lippincott Prize. Robert Henri, diary entry, Jan. 23, 1908, Robert Henri Papers, reel 886, frame 12, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Bellows was enlightened of this incident. He wanted Robert C. Hall, who purchased Forty-two Kids from the Thirteenth Almanac Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute in 1909, to know that "the direction, feeling that Mr. Lippincott would non similar the decision, would non allow the accolade." [12] [12]
Bellows to John Westward. Beatty, c. May 24, 1909, Papers of the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA, reel xiv, letter group 565, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Establishment, Washington, DC. When asked if he thought the jury feared Lippincott would object to the naked children, Bellows deflected attention past quipping: "No, it was the naked painting that they feared." [13] [thirteen]
"Those Who Paint What They See," New York Herald, February. 23, 1908, Literary and Fine art sec., 4. He did not elaborate, leaving unclear whether he meant the painting'southward sketchy appearance or its lowly subject.

Although Bellows'southward painting appears innocent plenty to viewers today, the mixed reception likely stemmed from the connotations of what one critic called the "curiously freakish subject." [14] [14]
C. H. C., "Carnegie Plant Exhibition, the Figure Subjects: Starting time Notice," New York Evening Postal service, May 1, 1909, sec. 1, 5. Fifty-fifty equally Bellows's scene recalls Thomas Eakins'south 1885 painting Swimming [fig. 3] [fig. 3] Thomas Eakins, Swimming, 1885, oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas , it likewise echoes the lowbrow style and content of comic strips like Hogan's Alley, which chronicled the capers of its slum-abode protagonist, the Xanthous Kid. [15] [15]
Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the Urban center: Urban Vision and the Ashcan Schoolhouse (Berkeley, CA, 2006), 221. Where Eakins evokes a tradition of Arcadian naturalism, aligning his nude, dominicus-dappled subjects with classical antiquity, Bellows's undeniably modern kids are accorded no such nobility. Around 1900, the slang term "kid" connoted immature hooligans with predilections for mischief and petty criminal offence; its lower-class associations would take been clear to Bellows's audition. [16] [16]
See Marianne Doezema, George Bellows and Urban America (New Haven, 1992), 147. Bellows had used vernacular titles earlier, in his 1906 paintings Kids (now in the collection of James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin) and River Rats (private collection, Washington, DC). The latter employs an epithet for juvenile delinquents that draws on an established rhetorical link between immigrants and animals. This association was also applied to the kids in the Gallery's pic, who were described equally "simian." [17] [17]
John Cournos, "Three Painters of the New York Schoolhouse," International Studio 56, no. 224 (Oct. 1915): 244. This was probable a reference to the then-popular extravaganza of Irish gaelic Americans equally apelike, [18] [18]
L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC, 1997). although the varied skin tones of Bellows'south kids appear to reverberate the range of ethnicities—Italian, Russian, German, Smoothen, and Irish—represented in the poor neighborhoods of Manhattan'due south E Side.

The "simian" slur was surpassed past another critic, who alleged: "virtually of the boys look more like maggots than like humans." [nineteen] [19]

Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, "An Excellent Academy Show," New York Evening Mail, March fourteen, 1908. Another simultaneously likened Bellows'southward kids to insects and germs when he suggested that "the tangle of bodies and spidery limbs" was akin to "the antics of magnified animalculae." [20] [20]
"George Bellows, an Artist with 'Red Blood,'" Current Literature 53, no. three (Sept. 1912): 345. Fifty-fifty Bellows'southward widow, Emma, used entomological vocabulary when she recalled the "old dock" due north of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, from which her husband might have fabricated preparatory sketches for 40-2 Kids, describing the area as a "dead end neighborhood—swarming with growing boys." [21] [21]
Emma Bellows to Marian King, Jan. 23 and Feb. vi, 1959, NGA curatorial files.

Contemporaneous literary descriptions of New York City's tenements relied on metaphors that linked recently arrived immigrant slum dwellers and their dingy environments with all mode of unhygienic animals. The colorful similes applied to Forty-two Kids can be understood in this context. [22] [22]
Molly Suzanne Hutton considers connections betwixt Ashcan paintings, animals, and dirt in "The Ashcan City: Representational Strategies at the Turn of the Century" (PhD diss., Stanford Academy, 2000), chap. 2. From 1890 until the mid-1920s, some 25 million immigrants entered the United States. With the Clearing Human activity of 1891, the federal government established rigorous medical screening that, amidst other things, barred persons suffering from contagious diseases. Foreigners, in general, came to be judged every bit diseased and contagious. [23] [23]
Howard Markel and Alexander Minna Stern, "The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Club," Milbank Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2002): 757. See likewise Ian Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace" (Baltimore, MD, 1995). Bathing, in municipal swimming pools and open-h2o floating baths, was endorsed as a salubrious and aseptic form of exercise, a way of cleaning, quite literally, recently arrived immigrants. Bellows'due south swimming pigsty, nonetheless, is far from salubrious. As one critic noted, the painting has "a bituminous look sick assorted with the thought of bathing." [24] [24]
Philip Fifty. Unhurt, "Boston Art Shown in Philadelphia," Boston Herald, Jan. 26, 1908, Special sec. Although Bellows reportedly said, "One tin can only paint what i sees," [25] [25]
"Those Who Paint What They Run into," New York Herald, Feb. 23, 1908, Literary and Art sec., iv. Xl-2 Kids elicited responses that went across the painting'due south superficial and purely visible subject and drew on the distasteful metaphors with which the metropolis's immigrant populations were associated. Described as bacteria, maggots, and insects, Bellows's kids were characterized equally vectors of contagion, an affiliation quite in keeping with the widely held belief, at the beginning of the 20th century, that unrestricted immigration posed a very real threat to private Americans' well-existence and the nation's social health.

Adam Greenhalgh

September 29, 2016

souderjohns1967.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.134485.html

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