George Bellows American Life

American history is found in all the infrastructure, art and literature seen everyday by the average American. They hold hidden meanings through the passage of time that need to be discovered and interpreted. In the early twentieth century, America was leaving the prosperous but corrupt Gilded Age to enter a time of progressive movement. George Bellows, an Ashcan painter, illustrates the time period and change of American lifestyle with his realistic paintings of city life. Bellows did not paint the advertised American life of wonder and glamour, but the harsh reality of American immigrants’ lives. He painted the true side of America, the urban neighborhoods flooded with unskilled immigrants. Some of his paintings include: Paddy Flannigan, …show more content…
He utilizes dark tones to support his point of the dreadful life many immigrant children live daily. One message Bellows was trying to convey through this portrait, was that child labor laws need to be issued nationwide, to stop children, like Paddy Flannigan, from growing in an environment unfit for any human. In this progressive era child labor laws were being issued within states, but some children were still working in harsh factory conditions. Paddy Flannigan’s scraps of clothes, dirty face, thin body and rough hands, shows the underlying causes of early twentieth century America. Bellows is able to coerce guilt and disgust to form in my heart when I see this painting. To see a child, no older than ten, dressed in such despicable clothing makes me disgusted with the time period’s people and government. Paddy even shows a face of arrogance in his portrait, with his nose stuck high in the air and his eyes looking down at those beneath him; a face that shouldn’t be found on a child. This attitude towards life was born from the harsh reality of living in impoverished districts of the city. Paddy Flannigan had to learn to become tough to live in a city that could quite easily kill him. The realization that young children could have their life taken from them, incites this sense of guilt and justice to change America. Bellows was trying to convey his message that …show more content…
Boxing was one of the most popular entertainment forms of the day and age of the white male dominated world. Bellows shows this violence in his furious brush strokes of rippling muscles pounding away at each other. By utilizing dark tones in the background and lighter ones for the individual boxers, Bellows is able to highlight the violence of the boxers’ fight. It not only displays the ferociousness of the boxers, but the audience’s thrill for the fighting. I believe these tones allowed him to demonstrate the hardships of the early twentieth century. Bellows could have used the boxers to symbolize the hardships of American immigrants. American immigrants struggled to survive in this cesspool of corruption everyday. They fought to support their families and overcome the overbearing thumb of corporations’ day after day. On the other hand, the dark background for the audience shows the corrupt schemes and betting that happens behind America’s curtains. The audience of the boxing match is even more violent than the boxers themselves. The audience can symbolize the large corporations of the nation controlling everything behind the scenes. These large entities controlled the lives of the workers beneath them, dictating how they lived. The corporations lived in entertainment, while their unskilled immigrant workers struggled to survive. I believe Bellows was trying to shed