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| George Bellows, Men of the Docks, 1912. National Gallery of Art, London. |
The [Robert] Henri School was regarded as radical and revolutionary in its methods, and it was. ... Art was not a matter of rules and techniques, or the search for an absolute ideal of beauty.... It was the expression of ideas and emotions about the life of the time. We were encouraged to make sketches of everyday life in the streets, the theatre, the restaurant and everywhere else.... Enthusiasm for running around and drawing things in the raw ran high.
Stuart Davis, quoted in James Johnson Sweeney, Stuart Davis (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1945)
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| George Bellows, Blue Morning, 1909. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC |
"An attractive picture George Bellows presents - a stark, harsh, ugly and powerfully felt portrayal of the Pennsylvania excavation. There is the great gaping wound in the dirty earth made by the machines. Snow, smudgy snow, is seen. A few dots stand for the busy humanity below - a picture to make rosewater idealism shiver and evaporate."
James Huneker, 1908 exhibition review
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| George Bellows, Pennsylvania Station Excavation, c.1907-08. Brooklyn Museum, New York |
"Anywhere along the docks are facilities for petty thieving, and, guard as any policeman may, the swarms of small street rovers can circumvent them. A load of wood left on the dock diminishes under his very eyes. The sticks are passed from one to another, the child nearest the pile being busy apparently playing marbles. If any move of suspicion is made toward them, they all take off like a swarm of cockroaches, and with about as much sense of responsibility. Children of this order hate school with an inextinguishable hatred."
Helen Campbell, Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1892)
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| George Bellows, Forty-Two Kids, 1907. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. |
"Henri was my father in Art, I got my Whitman through him. Whitman's love for all men, his beautiful attitude toward the physical, the absence of prudishness ... all this represented a force of freedom. ... I liked what resulted from his descriptive catalogues of life. They helped to interest me in the details of life around me."
John Sloan
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| John Sloan, Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, 1907, Philadelphia Museum of Art |
"John Sloan, both in his paintings and in his brilliant relentless little etchings which give us such vivid glimpses of New York life, shows no tendency to grasp human wretchedness in the mass, but rather to show here and there a detached bit of life which has the power of suggesting the whole turbid current."
Charles Wisner Barrell, "The Real Drama of the Slums," The Craftsman (February 1909)
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| John Sloan, A Woman's Work, 1912. The Cleveland Museum of Art |
"The painter, the true painter for whom we are looking, will be he who can snatch its epic quality from the life of today and can make us see and understand, with brush or with pencil, how great and poetic we are in our cravats and our patent-leather boots. Next year let us hope that the true-seekers may grant us the extraordinary delight of celebrating the advent of new!"
Charles Baudelaire, "Salon of 1845"
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| Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens, 1862. National Gallery, London |
"The younger artists of America are conscious as they have never been of the social revolution that our country and civilization are going through and they would be very eager to express these ideals in a permanent art form, if they were given the Government's cooperation."
George Biddle, "An Art Renascence Under Federal Patronage," Scribner's (May 9, 1933)
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Doris Lee, General store and post office 1938. Mural at the Ariel Rios Federal Building, Washington, D.C. |
