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  • George Bellows's Boxers in Print
  • Rachel Schreiber (bio)

Ashcan artist George Bellows is perhaps most remembered for his widely reproduced paintings of boxers—one even appeared on a U.S. postage stamp issued in 1998. The paintings' celebrations of the virility of the athletic male body and their dynamic representation of the sport have made them extremely popular since their production in the early twentieth century. Less commonly known is that Bellows was committed to radical politics, and that his images of pugilism were vehicles for pointed social and cultural critique. In addition to exhibiting works in galleries, Bellows published his images in a range of periodicals, from mainstream magazines such as Collier's, Metropolitan Magazine, and The American Magazine to The Masses, a small-run socialist magazine published in Greenwich Village from 1911 to 1917. When all of his boxing images are read together, it becomes clear that for Bellows, these were not simply formal explorations of the athletic male body, but also sites for his class-inflected commentary on race, gender, and religion. Moreover, when studied alongside the full range of his production, his magazine illustrations and political cartoons—particularly those published in The Masses —help elucidate the full importance of these themes throughout his oeuvre.

One Bellows cartoon in particular, The Savior of His Race (figure 1), published in The Masses in May 1915, stands out as a key piece.1 Reading Bellows's production through this image and its caption unlocks significant themes that reappear in much of his work. Bellows had been commissioned by another publication, the popular Collier's magazine, to produce drawings of white boxer Jess Willard's highly publicized defeat of African American [End Page 159] boxer Jack Johnson. The drawing that appeared in The Masses is clearly based on one done for Collier's; however in The Masses it was printed not with any description of that particular fight, but simply with the title The Savior of His Race.


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Fig. 1.

George Bellows, "The Savior of His Race," The Masses, May 1915.

Unlike Bellows's paintings of boxers, here the drawing shows us the fighter between rounds, rather than mid action. Two assistants fan him with white towels while his trainer speaks with him in the corner of the ring. Willard appears Christlike, his arms stretched over the ropes, his torso and the post behind him completing the cruciform of his figure. The cartoon and its caption mock the ways that Willard's defeat of Johnson was touted as a triumphant contest of race. Bellows exposes the speciousness of Christian evangelism's assumptions of white superiority. In using boxing as the vehicle for this commentary, he also invokes a dimension of socioeconomic class. Formerly considered a vulgar, working-class sport, [End Page 160] boxing was, in the first decades of the twentieth century, appropriated by white middle- and upper-class men as a demonstration of manliness, an appropriation Bellows regularly critiqued in his boxing images.

We might therefore see The Savior of His Race as a decoder of Bellows's critiques of class, race, gender and evangelism in many of his works, even those which, at first glance, might not appear to be vehicles for his political or social commentary. Comparing this cartoon to Bellows's paintings and to his other published images will allow for a fuller exploration of these issues than has appeared in previous studies of Bellows's works, which have too often overlooked his participation in public discourse through publication in periodicals.

For many years, art historiography has rehearsed its bias both against print culture and against social or political content in the visual arts. The works of early twentieth-century American realists, including the Ashcan artists, have been discussed in purely formal terms, and their engagement with print culture often ignored altogether.2 During the 1910s, many of the Ashcan artists, united in their distaste for academic subject matter and their desire to depict the economic underbelly of the industrializing city, were affiliated with radical politics—communist, socialist, and anarchist. But the Red scares that followed the extremely radical decade of the 1910s led most of them to...

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