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SEEING SEX WHERE IT IS NOT: A COMPARISON OF THE BOXING WORKS OF GEORGE BELLOWS WITH THE ART OF JOHN SLOAN AND CHARLES DEMUTHZo? WrayAmerican Art and the Armory ShowMay 16th, 2014To inappropriately use a word to describe artwork is to dilute the meaning and potency of the art itself. Such is the danger that art historians encounter when they deem an artist acting as a voyeur in his choice of subject matter for his paintings or drawings. The dictionary definition of voyeurism is “the practice of obtaining sexual gratification by looking at sexual objects or acts, especially secretively.” It is more than simply desiring to watch someone or something when that object of one’s gaze does not realize that they are being watched. It is specifically about gaining sexual gratification from such a gaze. And so when Haywood and other art historians who cite him describe George Bellows’ boxing paintings as acts of voyeurism, he levels a heavy charge against Bellows and the spectators of boxing at the turn of the century. He not only calls them out for enjoying what they are watching, but he also insists that they find it sexually appealing. Because knowing whether someone finds something arousing would depend on reading his mind, Haywood’s claim about Bellows’ motives in depicting boxing would be quite difficult to substantiate. As a result, his claims fall short in visual and historical evidence to clearly show that Bellows is acting as a voyeur when he paints boxing matches, as well as the idea that he considers boxing to be a homoerotic subject. That Haywood’s claims are absurd becomes especially clear when Bellows boxing paintings and drawings are compared to truly voyeuristic or homoerotic artworks, such as those of John Sloan and Charles Demuth. Through comparison of Bellows’ boxing artworks to works by Sloan and Demuth, one can see that Bellows’ art is not voyeuristic or homoerotic, and that its meaning for Bellows more likely derives from his interest in painting urban American life and what he found fascinating when he moved to New York City.Bellows and BoxingTo understand the origin of Haywood’s arguments, it is necessary to understand Bellows’ background and the state of boxing at the time that Bellows depicted it. George Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio on August 12th, 1882. As the only child, his family was a “closely unified, highly religious Methodist family, whose precepts remained with him” even after he left Ohio. While Bellows had never been devoted to Christianity himself, having painted only one religious painting in his entire career, he “always maintained high standards of conduct and was a devoted family man.” In high school and college, Bellows’ two greatest loves were drawing and sports. He excelled at both of them throughout his educative years, and during college at Ohio State University he was actively recruited by the Cincinnati Reds to play professional baseball.But the draw of baseball was not enough to stifle Bellows’ attraction to making art. After the end of his junior year 1904, Bellows left Ohio State University and moved to New York City to kick-start his career as an artist. There, he enrolled in the New York School of Art under the tutelage of Robert Henri and moved to the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) building on Broadway and West fifty-seventh street. Bellows’ father strongly disapproved of George’s choice to pursue a life in the arts. Still bound to the traditional Victorian worldview that was slowly slipping away with the dawn of modernity in the twentieth century, Bellows, Sr., believed George should choose a profession that held a high social position in his community, such as banking or ministry. Although Bellows’ parents had been reticent about their son’s transplant to New York City, a world away from quiet and homogenous Columbus, his living choice of the YMCA comforted them. “The YMCA,” according to Haywood, “was known for its clean and wholesome environment; it was an institution that linked exercise to morality and manliness.” Furthermore, “the YMCA stressed that a healthy body housed a healthy mind, that a well-developed physique was evidence of alertness and strength.” Such values of masculine strength and a muscle-toned physique were championed at the time in society. Then-President Theodore Roosevelt served as a role model for males to fulfill newly defined gender roles of muscularity, fitness, and virility. He personally said that it displeased him “to see young Christians with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle.” Being fit was also seen as the patriotic and dutiful lifestyle choice to make at the turn of the century: “If our best citizens are dyspeptics, our worst citizens will rule the republic Hence it is the dictate of patriotism that we should encourage such popular games as tend to develop a vigorous physique.” Although some found art and masculinity to be mutually exclusive, Bellows was able to reconcile the two through his relationship with Henri, his teacher at the New York School of Art. Henri was a “commanding, dynamic personality and a man who loved literature and art,” exemplifying a life that combined two traits which had before been promoted as an impossible feat to Bellows. A fearless leader for his pupils, Henri encouraged students to ignore following a strict academic formula for picture making and instead to find their personal, unique forms of expression in art. In the art classroom, the prevailing message was that not only could a man practice art and still be masculine, but he could exert his manhood through the making of art.Boxing served as a perfect subject for the expression of masculinity through painting and drawing. Theodore Roosevelt, was one of boxing’s major supporters during his presidency. In conjunction with Roosevelt’s imperialistic policy “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick,” Roosevelt linked boxing, through its evocation of pure masculinity, to imperialism and civilization. “Boxing became a symbol for manliness itself—an antidote to overcivilization and degeneracy perceived by many to be a problem with American men after the turn of the century.” Boxing was a sport that combatted the lack of fitness and toughness that genteel Victorian society had caused to wane among males. But boxing’s complicated legal history attests to the power over social values and change that state legislatures believed it to possess. A sport originally followed by lower classes, boxing, also known as prizefighting, gained interest among higher classes with the career of national boxing hero John L. Sullivan. Defeating Jake Kilrain in 1889, Sullivan made over one million dollars and was invited to the White House. At the same time, Sullivan was known for his excessive drinking and habit of getting into a fight outside the prizefighting ring, having once been indicted for assault and battery. With such a personal history, boxing’s popularity did not lend it any respectability; it was still seen as a sport of the “urban underworld,” an entertainment source akin in decency to “sleazy saloons, gambling halls, and crowded, backroom sporting arenas.”Rising immigration after 1880 added to prizefighting’s sordid reputation, as the immigrants that often occupied the working classes. Blood sports such as prizefighting, gambling, and drinking were seen by the middle class as vices that prevented immigrants from assimilating into proper society. Seen in direct opposition to bourgeois middle class values of morality, hard work, and self-restraint, boxing clubs reinforced the dropping of inhibitions by endorsing the enjoyment of an activity that was immoral and unproductive. Nonetheless, middle- and upper-class men increasingly attended the lowlife boxing matches of their lower class counterparts, and match coverage appeared in middle-class newspapers such as the New York Times and the New York Tribune. Bellows, too, was pulled from the squeaky clean rooms of the YMCA into the seedy depths of prizefighting establishments. On September 1st, 1900, the New York State legislature banned public prizefighting contests, forcing the boxing world to find a way to skirt the law and continue the sport. Luckily for them (and for Bellows), boxing establishments discovered a loophole in the law. They started opening private athletic clubs that required a paid membership to join. The fighters were all given one night memberships, assuring that they could legally fight in the club. By charging through memberships rather than a public admission per fight, these fight clubs were no longer open to the public. This existence was not stable, however. The ban on boxing would be repealed and then reinstated throughout the early twentieth century. In 1909, the state government tried to prevent matches through raids and arrests, only to soon after legalize prizefighting and regulate it through the New York Boxing Commission. But by the mid-1910’s, boxing became legal and open to the public. The first match to allow women attendees was held at Madison Square Garden on March 25th, 1916.The Sharkey Athletic Club was an example of one of the private boxing clubs. While all of these private clubs were seen as dangerous, illicit spaces, Sharkey’s in particular had a reputation for being one of the tougher, seedier clubs to attend; therefore it was one of the most popular clubs. In 1906, Bellows moved to an apartment across the street from Sharkey’s giving him the opportunity to experience a world quite different from the YMCA. In July 1907, Bellows produced his first artwork that depicted boxing, a drawing titled The Knock Out (see figure 1). Weeks later, Bellows created his first boxing painting, Club Night (see figure 2). Two years later in August and October 1909, Bellows painted Stag At Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, respectively (see figures 3 and 4). Bellows would then not revisit the subject in painting until over a decade later. But it was these works that received Haywood’s assertion of examples of voyeurism and homoeroticism at work, so it is these four works on which my analysis will focus.Bellows’ Paintings’ Alleged Voyeurism and HomoeroticismInstead of diving right into painting the boxing matches, Bellows first drew the boxing matches that he observed. Always working from direct observation, The Knock Out represents his first effort to capture what would have been a high-energy, rapidly changing visual scene. Interestingly, Bellows’ drawing illustrates the taboo and immoral nature of this setting not in his depiction of the fighters themselves, but rather in the jeering crowd. Reminiscent of crazed monkeys, the spectators in the crowd around the boxing ring push themselves into the fighters’ realm. Pressing in on the ring ropes, their shouting, passionate faces reach so close to the fighters that they appear inches away from their bodies. One spectator in the foreground turns back and looks directly at viewers with a leering grin, pulling us into the violent madness that he sickly enjoys. The dramatic diagonal line created by the referee’s body separates the spectators from the fighters, suggesting that they are not on equal levels of depravity. This seems to be what Bellows believes: he said in 1910 that “I am not interested in the morality of prize fighting. But let me say that the atmosphere around the fighters is a lot more immoral than the fighters themselves.” But while it is the spectators that seem the most morally reprehensible, the drawing’s composition ultimately draws viewers’ eyes to the fighters. The bodies of the two fighters and the referee form a large equilateral triangle. Its two diagonal lines draw us into the shape while the horizontal bottom line of the triangle created by the fallen fighter serves as a bar that keeps viewers’ eyes at the triangle. In this way Bellows creates visual conditions that propel viewers to look at the fighters, so that we are also spectators of the fight. As we look at the highlighted musculature and the dramatic action of the referee stopping the still-standing fighter from hitting his fallen opponent once more, Bellows calls our attention to how we act and feel as spectators to this fight. By drawing such grotesque faces that jeer and jump around the ring with deranged countenances, Bellows compels us to question our own feelings toward the fight because none of us would want to look as disgusting as the spectators in the drawing. It is through this relationship to the spectators in the painting that Bellows creates which evokes the experience that the spectators had in watching the boxing match: “the spectators themselves are vicarious participants in the fight, encouraging a favored fighter and reacting to and with the punches until the bout’s end. Therefore, boxing, as a demonstration of male strength, belongs to the spectators as much as the fighters, who are their actors.” Even the mere observation of boxing helped men to affirm their masculinity as newly defined by strength and vigor. But some art historians think there is more to this image than its portrayal of a new culture in urban American life. Corbett, who affirms Haywood’s arguments about the homosexuality present in these images, posits that the still-standing fighter’s left fist, with its position at the fighter’s groin, has sexual implications. With the victorious fighter’s open legs forming an arc that curves over the losing fighter’s body, Bellows symbolizes sexual degradation. “The fist is sexualized in this carefully composed vignette, and in a way that undermines the careful structures of sexuality and masculine nature imposed by the time,” Corbett writes. With that fist landing the winning punch on the defeated fighter, as a sexualized symbol it has castrated the losing male. The underlying notion here is that since sexuality was repressed but was simultaneously “an important means of establishing one’s masculine identity,” the nearly nude males fighting served as a potent opportunity for voyeuristic behavior and the acting out of homoerotic desires. Corbett cites Bellows’ 1917 lithograph The Shower Bath (see figure 5) to show that Bellows was interested in depicting sexual subject matter involving nearly nude men. Calling the two central figures flirtatious and suggestive, Corbett argues that the fact that Bellows depicts these arenas of male nudity reveals his homoerotic interests. “Bellows’ glance at the world of pick-ups and covert sexuality,” according to Corbett, makes his view of an institution that celebrated manliness through physical health bear sexual implications.Doezema, another supporter of the homoeroticism argument, analyzed Club Night and attempted to reveal its homosexual undertones. Painted the month after he completed The Knock Out, Bellows painted Club Night on a canvas on which he had already painted another work. Perhaps he was still unconfident about his skill in depicting boxing, and chose not to invest his work on a fresh new canvas because of his low expectations for its outcome. The greater fluidity of the mark-making in his painting as compared to his drawing, Doezema thinks, shows that Bellows found more freedom in the medium of oil paint as compared to pastel, and that he was better able to connect his emotions to the way he made his art. Thus Club Night and Bellows’ other paintings of boxing are evocative of Bellows’ emotional reaction to these scenes. In Club Night, Doezema’s main argument for its homosexuality is the way that the fighters’ body positions complement each other. If meshed together, they would intertwine and fit like a puzzle piece, much like a sexual embrace. In comparison to The Knock Out, Bellows has changed the vantage point from above the crowd to within the crowd, bringing viewers closer to this sexually juicy action. It is as if, Doezema posits, Bellows is becoming less afraid of this seedy underworld, and more willing to venture into its depths and enjoy the sexual pleasure that is derivable from this spectacle.Haywood focuses on Stag at Sharkey’s for his arguments concerning Bellows’ voyeurism and homoeroticism. Here, Haywood notices the similarities between the right fighter’s torso and that of The Belvedere Torso, knowing that Bellows had studied ancient art (see figure 6). While the torso in Stag at Sharkey’s has the anonymity, strength, and dynamism of The Belvedere Torso, it uniquely possesses a manic energy that would be expected of a torso engaged in a boxing match. Bellows communicates this with violent, energetic brushstrokes. The flesh-toned brushstrokes in the torso are interspersed with red strokes, evoking a blood-stained body. In depicting the body of the fighter this way, Bellows highlights the drama and violence of the fight, both of which enthrall the spectators, according to Haywood. “The spectators themselves are vicarious participants in the fight, encouraging a favored fighter and reacting to and with the punches until the bout’s end. Therefore, boxing, as a demonstration of male strength, belongs to the spectators as much as the fighters, who are their actors.” Since Haywood believes that the spectators are voyeuristic in their watching of boxing, the fighters themselves, his argument follows, express the homoeroticism the spectators crave. The artist, as one of these spectators, is one of these voyeurs, especially since he watches the fighters closely and attempts to capture the body positions of the fighters as well as their muscular movement. “Men are in combat and contact. Men also pose, posture, and punch for the pleasure and thrill of other men,” says Haywood. The boxing ring is almost like the homosexual equivalent to a strip club. The one area of the body that is not nude is the genital area, covered only by tight, white boxing shorts. Haywood surmises that the fact that it is the only clothed part of the body highlights and draws attention to it: “The boxing shorts serve as markers that highlight an area of both anxiety and pleasure. In Bellow’s painting, the libidinal powers propelling the boxers are emphasized by the accent on this region.” Bellows draws viewers’ eye to the boxer short area even more by the position of the right fighter’s right knee, pointed squarely at the left fighter’s groin. With that knee poised to hit the groin, there is a symbolic castration of the losing male fighter on the left. Even though it is custom that the boxers shorts are what the fighters wear, abiding by this rule automatically implicates Bellows in focusing on the fighters’ genital region since he chooses to depict the scene realistically.Haywood calls “the artist, like the spectator…a voyeur, utterly enthralled by the drama of a fight and the surrounding atmosphere, however demonic it may be...For Bellows, to paint Stag at Sharkey’s was to engage in the thrill of the fight.” As mentioned earlier, voyeurism is not just about watching someone. To be a voyeur is to take sexual pleasure in the object of your gaze. Haywood sees sexuality in the painting in the depiction of the fighters. On a primary level, he believes boxing itself has a homoerotic nature to it given that the fighters fight nearly nude and that their sport revolves around trying to make contact with one another’s bodies. “The struggle of two men encaged and on display magnified the tensions and private desires between men”; in other words, according to Haywood, there is a sexual tension in the struggle between two male fighters trying to (sexually) overcome each other’s bodies. Through the focus on bodily contact by these fighters, there is necessarily a needed knowledge of male anatomy so that fighters know where to place the most fatal hits, as well as the areas to avoid. As such, Haywood’s argument follows, different body parts “were marked as spots for abuse, while others were off-limits. The marking off and focus on the body—the assignment or restriction of zones for touch and for legal punches—assume overtones of sexuality, particularly sadomasochism.” Haywood sees boxing as a combination of pleasure and pain, especially since the sport is essentially about two men trying to cause each other pain to the point of one succumbing to it. As Bellows more bluntly described it, when he painted boxing he was painting “two men trying to kill each other.” Because boxing is a sport fixated on pain, Haywood believed that to watch it was to fulfill a sadomasochistic fantasy: “In boxing, pleasure and power are derived from pain, from resistance to pain, or from stamina, which is often the ability to endure pain. For the spectator the boxing match is an acting out, a sadomasochistic fantasy made real...signs of desire and sexual fear are also coded on the boxer’s body.” In Bellows’ very choice to depict this sport, it seems, he was already revealing his interest in the synthesis of sexuality and pain. In short, Haywood summarizes that “boxing is homoerotic desire displaced, enacted, and re-repressed.” From everything contained in Bellows’ painting, this is what Haywood ultimately sees. The fighters cannot fully satisfy their homoerotic desire with a sexual embrace because they are too focused on hurting each other to do so. “Any longing for intimacy is obstructed and destroyed by the relentless drive to ‘punish’ and damage the body.” Apparently, these fighters necessarily have homosexual desires for each other, but because of their attraction to sadomasochism, they are driven to hurt and punish the one in which they are most sexually interested. Overall, according to Haywood, boxing is a dance of foreplay mixed with pleasurable pain, a sexually appetizing show for the spectators. “Two well-developed men alternate courting and whipping each other. Boxing, as exposed and powerfully accentuated as it is in Stag at Sharkey’s, is male to male masochistic foreplay, craved and detested, on public display.” Haywood suggests that the way Bellows paints these boxing matches magnifies boxing’s homoeroticism as well as its brutality.While Haywood does not discuss Both Members of This Club as extensively as Stag at Sharkey’s, it is quite predictable what he would say. Most of Haywood’s arguments concerning Stag at Sharkey’s are general enough to apply to all of Bellows’ boxing paintings, since they all feature a sport that is allegedly entrenched in homoeroticism. Like his other paintings, Both Members of This Club possesses the jeering, lascivious spectators, the knee pointed at the groin, and the fighters’ body postures that could fit together like puzzle pieces. This is the problem with Haywood’s ideas concerning these paintings by Bellows. Picking a couple pieces of equivocal evidence, Haywood has fabricated a homosexual narrative around these works, shortchanging the richer, more plausible and verifiable meanings that exist in the paintings. Compared to other artists and artworks that have substantially more support behind their narratives of homoeroticism and voyeurism, Haywood’s artificial constructs around Bellows’ works appear especially shallow.Voyeurism: Bellows versus SloanArt historian Janice M. Coco presents a cogent argument that fellow Ashcan artist John Sloan feared women, and that he engaged in voyeurism through his artwork to conquer his fear and feel the sexual dominance by the power of his gaze that had evaded him before. Unlike Bellows, Sloan has actually admitted that he enjoyed secretly watching people. In fact, he thought it was more polite to watch people without them knowing his presence. “I am in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it. I ‘peep’ through real interest, not being observed myself. I feel that it is no insult to the people you are watching to do so unseen, but that to do it openly and with great expression of amusement is an evidence of real vulgarity.” In this quote, Sloan is openly endorsing voyeurism as the better, more respectful way of observation. The artist’s drawings and paintings are products of Sloan’s discreet window-watching. Night Windows, a 1910 etching by Sloan, exemplifies his voyeurism (see figure 7). In this etching, Sloan has drawn women in their bedrooms—intimate settings—wearing nothing but thin nightgowns, much less clothing than they would wear in public. He also captures them taking part in nightly rituals which they assume are private. This violation of privacy is also a violation of the intimacy which these women have allowed in their relationship with Sloan; they have not allowed Sloan into their bedrooms, but Sloan is forcing himself into these spaces. In Sloan’s 1909 oil on canvas Three A.M., the artist’s voyeurism becomes even more intrusive, zooming in on a single woman at a usually private hour in the night (see figure 8). He depicts the woman standing with her nightgown draped dangerously low over her shoulder, almost exposing her breasts—one of the most intimate parts of a woman’s body. She thinks she is alone with her friend, quietly smoking a cigarette in private, free to wear something as scantily clad as she prefers. But Sloan has invaded this privacy and captured the woman unknowingly in her bareness, depicting both her body and her actions without her consent. Here we find an important distinction between the alleged voyeurism in Bellows’ boxing artworks and the actual voyeurism taking place in Sloan’s work. In Sharkey’s Athletic Club, there is no secrecy about who is watching the fighters. The fighters are fully aware that they are being watched by a large crowd of men; in fact, that is the very point of this spectator sport. While the male fighters wear very little clothing, this is part of their public uniform in this setting, and not what they wear when they are alone in their private homes. They have consented to being watched, and will be rewarded monetarily for it. Sloan, on the other hand, is going out of his way to watch women without their consent in the most intimate spheres of their lives. He captures them not in their public attire, but in thin nightgowns, emphasizing their bodies and giving him the opportunity to see them in a way that the public normally would not. Sloan is also drawing these women as they stand in their bedrooms, the room in the home with the most sexual implications. The boxing ring, in contrast, has no inherently sexual qualities. For these reasons there is necessarily a sexual nature in Sloan’s images, while in Bellows’ images there is no naturally sexual atmosphere. While no evidence exists that Bellows chose to depict boxing to fulfill his homoerotic desires or a voyeuristic wish, Sloan’s memoirs do support the notion that he feared women and used window artworks to conquer that fear. Of his youth, Sloan recalls that “the other boys my age were going out mashing…and I guess I just preferred to draw and to escape the problem of what to do about girls. I was always afraid of them, and afraid that I would find myself married and caught for life.” Instead of engaging with girls himself, Sloan fancied drawing them instead to fulfill his sexual cravings. As Coco points out, Sloan’s quote indicates that he used drawing as a form of escape, and that therefore art was Sloan’s defense mechanism against potential problems with women. This is further supported by another memory of Sloan that he attended night art classes to avoid attending dances where there was the potential for a girl to “get” him. Even though women liked him, whenever girls such as his sisters’ friends tried to “get hold” of him, he was “scared stiff.” Sloan’s diary entries that contain passages about women reveal how he could view them as sexual objects, making it plausible that he could paint them that way. In these entries, he describes women in terms of their appearances and how their bodies are accentuated by their clothing. At the motor races for the Vanderbilt Cup in 1906, Sloan described one woman he saw as “a girl full of figure in a tight white sweater.” In 1909 at a party at artist Everett Shinn’s home, Sloan noted “beautiful figures displayed…one woman buxom and child faced after two marriages…her sister…plump breasted, hipped and thighed…an English actress of the ultra-modern type…her flesh well in evidence so tight fitting and clinging was the gown.” Coco notices that in his diary and letters, Sloan only talks about women in such a sexual, body-conscious manner when they are from a distance and anonymous to him. “Given these observations,” Coco offers, “it is probable that, in certain instances, Sloan’s distanced gaze, with its attendant politics of subjective male power, is indeed sexually grounded.” Coco’s observation explains why Sloan did not simply paint portraits of nude women to express his sexual desires. It is the very distance that his window scenes create which sexually attracts Sloan to depict women this way. What separates Sloan from Bellows here is that we have Sloan’s own words verifying his attitude towards sexuality and women, as well as the reason that he secretly watched women. He is so candid about the way the watches people, that he even drew a sketch of himself spying on people from his window in a letter to Robert Henri (see figure 9). Although Bellows did not keep a diary or memoirs as Sloan did, there is testament to possible voyeurism in his letters or in any documented quotes. What we can fairly compare are the works of Sloan to those of Bellows. And in Bellows’ boxing works, there is not the same visual support that we can find in Sloan’s window paintings. Homoeroticism: Bellows versus DemuthWhile Sloan’s voyeuristic window scenes provide a helpful counterpoint to Bellows’ allegedly voyeuristic boxing scenes, Charles Demuth’s homoerotic watercolors show us what truly homoerotic works look like, making the claims for Bellows’ works’ homoeroticism appear quite unfounded. One of Haywood’s principal allegations towards the boxing paintings’ homoeroticism is that Bellows chose to paint a sport that is intrinsically homoerotic, based on men wearing next to nothing and touching each other in order to cause pain. But this would mean that artists cannot paint anything that possesses vaguely sexual elements without being considered to be homoerotic painters. The true indicator of a homoerotic painting is when the artist inserts eroticism into a tableau that is not inherently sexual. Such is the case with Demuth’s watercolors. In Demuth’s Turkish Bath series, Demuth places obviously phallic symbols in the scene and accentuates certain sexual body parts in the male figures. (see figures 10 and 11). In the 1916 Turkish Bath, for example, in the left corner Demuth has placed a faucet whose natural shape has been manipulated to closely resemble a phallus. Unlike Bellows’ boxing paintings, the insertion of a phallus shaped object in a painting as a homosexual symbol has art historical precedent. In Dürer’s woodcut The Bath House, the artist also uses a faucet as a phallic symbol (see figure 12). Demuth, perhaps having used Dürer’s woodcut as inspiration for this watercolor, employs the same symbolism in his own work. As if that were not enough to make viewers think about penises when they view Demuth’s watercolors, the figure in the left corner of the 1916 Turkish Bath has an erection. “His sexual excitement,” Weinberg notes, “is a sign that if the men are not gathered to have sex on the spot, they are involved in ‘anatomic inspections’ that may lead to later rendezvous.” Although the scene is not pornographic, inclusions such as these heavily sexualize a composition that was not sexual to begin with. Whereas in Bellows’ paintings it was part of his realist mission to depict the musculature and the boxers as he actually saw them, Demuth does not realistically portray a Turkish bath, instead emphasizing certain elements to imbue it with homosexuality. While it is advantageous for boxers to wear little clothing to increase their breathability and eliminate places that their opponents can grab them, there is no reason why the figures in Demuth’s watercolors have to wear such scant clothing. In the 1915 Turkish Bath, The male figure in the foreground that massages another man wears a skimpy loincloth, one that does still shows the figure’s buttocks. To make sure viewers see those buttocks, Demuth draws strong lines on these areas in a comparatively hazy image and draws attention to them with bright red brushstrokes, which are especially conspicuous in a painting filled with flesh tones and dark blues. The main difference between Bellows’ depiction of nearly nude men and that of Demuth is that while Bellows simply painted what he saw, Demuth went out of his way to paint what he did not see, and to do so in a way that emphasized its sexuality. Demuth also depicts the figures embracing each other in a way that would not be necessary for what they are doing and emphasizes the pleasure-filled smiles on their faces, a non-realist approach that exists in complete opposition to the realist painter that Bellows was. In the 1915 Turkish Bath, in the upper left corner one male figure holds another male figure around his waist, his hands dangling close to the figure’s phallus and his head buried affectionately in the figure’s back. The figure spreads his arm out with a nondescript expression on his face, clearly condoning what this other figure is doing. In contrast to the fighters in Bellows’ paintings, which he could have chosen to depict as locked in embrace as they were fighting but did not, Demuth does decide to depict these figures in an intimate embrace, without any explanation as to why they would do so. Since this is a public bath house and not a private home, it is likely that these are not brothers displaying familial love. With a homoerotic tone already present in the work, their action only contributes to it.Since homosexuality was still taboo in the United States, the willingness of artists to publicly exhibit their artwork, and the reaction to that artwork, reveals how homosexual the paintings were perceived to be on the part of their artists. Demuth’s watercolors were never publicly displayed and were discovered only after his death. Weinberg tells us that the audience for Demuth’s homoerotic art exclusively included “the artist, intimate friends, and those who are meant to discover the work after Demuth’s death…[the pictures] have the quality of intimate confessions or of a memoir discovered long after its author has passed away.” Demuth had to keep his actual homosexuality a secret in order to escape social ostracization in America. He had to wait for more progressive future generations to accept his homosexuality. In contrast, Bellows had no problem publicly exhibiting all of his boxing works; in fact, they were responsible for his rise to fame as a contemporary artist in New York, and most of them found buyers. In 1909, the year he painted Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of this Club, he was elected to the National Academy of Design, receiving the reputation as “a painter of ‘passing phases of the town in a manly, uncompromising fashion,’ who found excitement where weaker souls saw only ugliness.” Two years later, Bellows was dubbed “the most successful young painter in New York.” None of the critics who saw Bellows’ artwork when it was first exhibited detected homosexual content. Instead, it was hailed as “gutsy” and “aggressive,” the paragon of manliness and modernity.Conclusion In his chapter on Demuth, Weinberg said that “art allows us to see what we are normally not permitted to see.” But art also makes it easier for people to see something that is not there. At the mercy of contemporary art historians to decide Bellows’ significance and character as an artist one hundred years ago, Bellows is a victim to the false imposition of a voyeuristic, homosexual gaze. This falsity comes at the expense of greater qualities in these paintings being ignored. For all their focus on homosexuality, so many of the scholarship on Bellows that I read failed to appreciate the dynamics of race, class, and morality teeming in these paintings. They mention that they are there, but delve no further into their investigation. Besides the social impact of Bellows’ boxing paintings, the sheer mastery at the depiction of musculature, and the technical comparison of his rendering of these fighters with that of other artists such as Thomas Eakins, has not been explored to its fullest potential relative to the specious body of work on the sexual aspects of these paintings. Even in the art world, sex sells, and perhaps that is what drove these art historians to find sex where it was not. I believe that, sadly, they found something that was false and lost the opportunity to tap into real meaning behind Bellows’ captivating paintings.FiguresFigure 1. George Bellows. The Knock Out, 1907. Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR.Figure 2. George Bellows, Club Night. 1907. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.Figure 3. George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey’s. 1909. Cleveland Museum of Art.Figure 4. George Bellows, Both Members of This Club, 1909. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.Figure 5. George Bellows, The Shower Bath, 1917. Cleveland Museum of Art.Figure 6. The Belvedere Torso, 1st Century B.C.E. Vatican Museums.Figure 7. Sloan, John. Night Windows. 1910. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE.Figure 8. Sloan, John. Three A.M. 1909. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia, PAFigure 9. Sloan, John. Letter, Sloan to Robert and Marjorie Henri. 1912. Delaware Art ?????Museum, Wilmington, DE. ??????Figure 10. Charles Demuth, Turkish Bath, 1915, Private Collection.Figure 11. Charles Demuth, Turkish Bath, 1916, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.Figure 12. Albrecht Dürer, The Bath House, 1496, Yale University Art Gallery.BibliographyBrock, Charles, ed. George Bellows. Washington, D.C.: Publishing Office of the National Gallery of Art, 2012.Bryce, Lloyd S. "A Plea for Sport." The North American Review 128, no. 270 (May ?????1879): 511-25.Coco, Janice M. "Re-Viewing John Sloan's Images of Women." Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 2 (1998): 81-97.?Corbett, James Peter, “Life in the Ring: Boxing, 1907-1909”, in George Bellows, ed. Charles Brock.?Doezema, Marianne. George Bellows and Urban America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.?Hammer, David, and Susan M. Arensberg. "George Bellows, Part I." Video file, 20:42. National Gallery of Art. Accessed May 15, 2014.?Haywood, Robert. "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's': Boxing, Violence, and Male Identity." Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 2-15.?Schreiber, Rachel. "George Bellows's Boxers in Print." The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 159-81.Sweet, Frederick A. "George Bellows: His Paintings." Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago (1907-1951) 40, no. 2 (February 1946): 9-13.Weinberg, Jonathan. Speaking for Vice : Homosexuality in the Art of Charles ?????Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avante-garde. New Haven, ?????CT: Yale University Press, 1993.?Zurier, Rebecca. Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1995.?? ................
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