8 Artists Magazine January/February 2020Prime ANATOMY OF A PAINTING
CHESTER DALE COLLECTION, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Bellows’ palette presents contrasting golds
and blues, and warm and cool tones. The
tenement building itself runs the gamut
fromsubduedshadowsatitsbasetothe
topfloorilluminatedbya blazeofsunlight.The painting’s gridded design and hard-angled architecture make
a strikingly modern impression. A tenement rises at the center of
the canvas, flanked by a sequence of other verticals and
intersectedbytheflowoftheEastRiver.Bellowstiltedthedistant
groundplaneupward,thuscreatinga hostofinterlockingshapes.New York City’s immigrant housing
was notoriously shabby, but it
fascinated Bellows. “Those tenement
houses behind the [Pennsylvania
Station] excavation always give me
the creeps,” he said. “They’re just
ordinary houses, but there’s
something about them that gets me.”There’sadmirablecomplexityandphysicalityinthepaint
application.Pigmentis appliedthicklythroughout,inthedistant
planes as well as in the foreground. According to the National
Gallery of Art’s description, Bellows “employed both translucent
and opaque paint mixtures, alternating between wet-into-wet
and wet-into-dry techniques.” Finely handled details such as
trees and figures are juxtaposed with sweeping passages in
which Bellows sometimes troweled on the paint, using a knife.