BELLOWS, George

Lithograph

22 x 26" MATTED

In Business Men’s Baths (1923) George Bellows depicts a group of men in an athletic club splashing around a pool and toweling themselves off. In a tradition that went back to Thomas Eakins, such scenes were the only acceptable way artists could depict the naked male body, an object otherwise unexposed in polite American society. Eakins had glorified that body as a modern incarnation of ancient Greek ideals. Bellows, instead, satirically exposes the modern reality of men’s bodies. Some are skinny, some are fat, some are old and bald; only a very few are beautiful. Businessmen were the new warriors of American society in the 1920s, responsible for American world-wide economic domination and the wealth which made life so pleasant; Bellows shows us what businessmen looked like stripped of this spurious glamour. Bruce Robertson, Representing America p. 47

1923

BELLOWS, George

b. United States, 1882 - 1925

Gift of Don Trevey to the Ken Trevey Collection of American Realist Prints

1992.58