Tag: george bellows

George Bellows

George Bellows, “The Knock Out”, 1907, Ink and Pastel on Paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In 1907 George Bellows, a member of the Ashcan School of Art,  produced the first of several paintings of prizefighters in action in the ring; these expressed violent action with power and seeming spontaneity. He was fascinated with the spectacle of the great city: its buildings, crowds, types, and rivers. Though he was denounced by conservative critics as one of the “apostles of ugliness,” his technical brilliance made him more acceptable than any of the other painters of similar impulse.

George Bellows

George Bellows, “Dempsey and Firpo”, Oil on Canvas, 1924, Whitney Museum of Art, New York

Dempsey and Firpo, one of George Bellows’s most ambitious paintings, captures a pivotal moment in the September 14, 1923 prizefight between American heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and his Argentine rival Luis Angel Firpo. The frenzy lasted less than four minutes, Firpo going to the floor nine times and Dempsey twice. Although Dempsey was the eventual victor, the artist chose to represent the dramatic moment when Firpo knocked his opponent out of the ring with a tremendous blow to the jaw.

At the match on assignment for the New York Evening Journal, Bellows portrays himself as a balding man at the extreme left of the picture. His geometrically structured composition also creates a low vantage point that includes the viewer: looking up at this angle, we find ourselves among the spectators pushing Dempsey back into the ring. The excitement is further heightened by the chromatic contrast between the fighters bathed in lurid light, and the dark, smoke-filled atmosphere around them.