Brand-Building with George Bellows.
How Frank Rehn Flipped the Script on Fine Art in the 1920s.
Years ago, I studied with the painter Joseph Peller at the Art Students League of New York.1 Peller doled out simple, digestible, actionable insights, which I received by finding a much harder route before admitting he was right all along and months of suffering were self-inflicted. One day he said simply: “Look at Bellows.”
“George Bellows? The boxing painter?”
I knew Bellows the way most people do: as the painter of Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of this Club — testosterone-drenched pictures of boxers beating each other to bloody pulp — fine paintings, but you have to be into that sort of thing. Of course Joe was right, and Bellows is so much more than boxing; and of course it took me months before I admitted this to myself and came to accept Bellows as one of the greatest American painters of any era.2
II. Stag Parties.
But I should be forgiven for tossing Bellows to the dustbin of toxic masculinity — he was overshadowed by his most famous subject for a full century. A lot of painters find what they’re good at or at least what they’ll be loved for and just keep doing that. Guy Wiggins painted snow scene after snow scene after snow scene, Jasper Cropsey hung his hat on ruddy autumn rivers, Walt Kuhn never met a clown he didn’t want to paint — and I just assumed there was a stack of Bellows boxing paintings lined up behind the handful I could name.
But there aren’t.
In a career cut tragically short at age 43, Bellows made nearly six hundred paintings — and six of them were fight scenes. It’s a little strange to speak of such a short career in the typical terms of “early” and “late” periods, but in the years when he was painting the fisticuffs canvases, Bellows was winning medals for paintings with titles like Little Girl in White, and, The Circus, and Portrait of Dr. Thompson — pictures you could bring to church. But in 1916, as his paintings were becoming more expensive, he indulged the advice of friends to produce something at a different price point. For the latter half of the 19th century, the art market had shown an appetite for inexpensive alternatives to oil paintings, and by the early twentieth century, dealers were specializing in providing watercolors, etchings, and pastels to collectors. As Bellows’ asking price for oil paintings rose into the four figures (big money then!), he installed a printing press in his studio.
Bellows really took to print-making. A master printer, George Miller, ran the plates through the press and oversaw certain technical aspects, but Bellows made the image with his own hand. This marks how far the fine art print had travelled since the days of the Tenth Street Studio Building3 fifty years prior, when the great painters simply shipped a canvas to England to have a professional print-maker do the copying. Bellows was making a new pictorial expression; it just happened to be available in an edition of a few hundred copies. His dealer at Milch Gallery knew there was an audience for sporting subjects — Winslow Homer, only recently passed, had done well lately with fishing and hunting watercolors — and at his behest Bellows included two boxing prints in the batch of 35 lithographs he made.4 Colliers Magazine commissioned him shortly thereafter to follow a prize fighter around and make drawings and prints on the visit. The next year, Milch exhibited prints and related drawings — and although there were a variety of subjects available, it was the boxing prints that hit.
Importantly, they succeeded at three levels. At the top, the prints were elevated to fine art status by hanging in the gallery space that would otherwise have presented oil paintings. At the middle, men bought the prints to decorate their man-caves. And at the bottom, a popular audience was seeing Bellows’ fight pictures in national magazines. Though the artist did not contrive it as such, it was a complete and successful rebrand. It cemented Bellows as a particular sort of painter for at least a hundred years.
III. Household Names.
It also showed dealers how profitable this model could be. In 1918, one of Milch’s employees started his own venture built on exactly this. Frank Rehn would be arguably one of the most important dealers of American art, but he didn’t build that house on oil painting. One of Bellows’ fellow classmates from art school learned of his contemporary’s success — another painter who was nonetheless unable to sell a single painting before he came to Rehn in 1924. The dealer accepted a batch of watercolors and quickly exhorted his best clients to come in and see “the best things of their kind since [Winslow] Homer.”5 That was no small compliment — Homer’s watercolors were the gold standard — and Rehn’s client’s listened. After struggling for decades, the print-maker and watercolorist Edward Hopper was vaulted to the national stage.
Rehn isn’t a household name, but he kept minting them. By 1926, Hopper’s oil paintings were joining major museum collections, and he in turn introduced another struggling friend to Rehn. Charles Burchfield was despondent, loathing the day-job that kept him from painting. Rehn quickly sold enough work for Burchfield to quit his job at the wall-paper factory — just in time for the Great Depression to strike. He never regretted the move — and, importantly, he never returned to oil painting. Burchfield stuck with the medium that worked so well with Rehn — watercolors and prints.6 By the following decade, Burchfield was listed in Life Magazine as one of America’s top ten artists, and Bellows was a competitor in the short-lived fine art event in the Olympics.7
Bellows’ Olympic career was posthumous; the painter succumbed to appendicitis in 1925. One of the last things he did was to buy something from Rehn — a nice little Edward Hopper watercolor.8
Thanks for reading! Join us in the coming weeks to close a strange loop on NFTs and we visit the greatest thing of its sort since the George Bellows exhibition in 2012: Winslow Homer at the Met!
Jonathan
Extraordinary art instruction is available right now at the League, and an article in Monocle Magazine this week details just how valuable it is. I happily disclose that have been a member for a decade and currently serve on the League’s Board of Control.
Charles Brock, Sarah Cash, and Mark Cole gave the world a powerful corrective in the 2012 catalogue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective exhibition. If you are yet among the unconverted, hasten thee to the library — it’s one of the great art historical monographs, cover to cover.
Read our article on Tenth Street here.
E.A. Carmean, Jr. John Wilmerding Linda Ayres Deborah Chotner, Bellows: The Boxing Pictures, National Gallery of Art, 1982, p. 104.
Garnett McCoy, John D. Morse, “Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper: Some Documentary Notes,” Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3/4, July - October, 1967, pp. 1-15.
There are actually only a few Burchfield prints; they’re great, and probably wouldn’t exist without the Rehn/Hopper connection.
The strange but true story of art at the Olympics here.
McCoy & Morse, 1967, p. 12.