The Barricade
"The Barricade" (1918) is an oil painting by George Wesley Bellows that was purchased by the Birmingham Museum of Art in 1991.
Bellows was well known for his bold, realistic portrayals of gritty urban scenes as a member of New York's "Ash Can School." He found commercial success with his lurid depictions of boxing matches. He was also inclined to portray episodes of what he perceived as injustices prevalent in modern society. When the United States entered World War I he volunteered for the Tank Corps, but was not deployed to Europe. He read published reports of the August 1915 German invasion of Belgium, including the exhaustive compilation of eyewitness reports published by the "Committee on Alleged German Outrages," authorized by the English government and chaired by Viscount James Bryce. Bellows was moved by the Spring of 1918 to spend the next eight months at his home in Middletown, Rhode Island creating a large series of images intended to highlight the vulnerability of civilian victims of war.
The "War Series", or "The Tragedies of the War in Belgium," consisted of five large-scale oil paintings on canvas, as well as thirty drawings and twenty lithographic prints. Twelve of the lithographs were exhibited as a group at the Albert Rollier Art Galleries in Chicago, Illinois in 1919 with the title, "War, Subjects Founded on the Bryce Report." Bellows' caption for lithograph version of "The Barricade" in that show read, "Belgian civilians in at least one instance were stripped and marched in front of the troops as a shield."
Though based on eyewitness accounts, Bellows' haunting images, along with the Bryce report itself, were considered examples of overblown propaganda by many contemporary critics, especially by proponents of American isolationism.
For "The Barricade", Bellows relied on an August 1914 report of invading German soldiers using townspeople as human shields for his subject, but used artistic license to depict the victims as nudes, their soft white forms providing a stark visual contrast to the shadowy mass of soldiers, bristling with bayonets, cowering behind them. At this point in his career, with fresh memories of Fauvist masterpieces at the 1913 Armory Show, Bellows was experimenting with the use of color.
The painting remained in the estate of the artist and passed to his widow, Emma, when he died at age 47 in 1925. It was sold from her estate in 1959 to H. V. Allison & Company, art dealers in New York. It was purchased by the museum with funding from the Harold and Regina Simon Fund, the Friends of American Art, Margaret Livingston and Crawford Taylor Jr.
The "War series" works were exhibited as a group at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2013. In 2015 "The Barricade" was a highlight of a career retrospective of Bellows that opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and returned to the Royal Academy in London.
References
- Peck, Glenn (August 13, 2001) "George Bellows and the Conflicts of His Age." Catalog for the exhibition "With My Profound Reverence for the Victims: George Bellows" at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York, New Paltz.
- Brass, Perry (August 13, 2015) "The Manly Pursuit of Desire -- To Fall in Love in Birmingham, Alabama" Huffington Post - accessed November 25, 2015
External link
- "The Barricade" at artsbma.org