New York

Bellows painted New York in 1911, at the height of his involvement with Robert Henri's circle and during a period when the Ashcan School, sometimes grouped within the broader current of American Realism, was insisting that the unglamorous facts of city life were legitimate and urgent subjects for serious painting. The work was produced just three years after the watershed 1908 exhibition of The Eight at the Macbeth Gallery, an event that had cracked open the conservative hold of the National Academy on American art. Bellows was not among The Eight, being too young for that founding moment, but he was Henri's most gifted student, and canvases like this one carried the project forward with considerably more physical swagger than his teachers. The painting captures Fifth Avenue and Broadway around 34th Street, a district then in the full roar of commercial and architectural expansion; the skyscrapers in the background are not incidental atmosphere but deliberate evidence of a city remaking itself faster than any single observer could record. New York entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where it remains one of the defining documents of early American urban modernity.