''Cliff Dwellers'' (1913) is an oil on canvas painting by George Bellows that depicts a colorful crowd on New York City's Lower East Side, on what appears to be a hot summer day. Its dimensions are , and it is in the collection of the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 19 ...

, which acquired it in 1916. The painting is a representative example of the

Ashcan School The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, was an artistic movement in the United States during the late 19th-early 20th century that produced works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the city's poorer neighborhoods. ...

, a movement in early-20th-century American art that favored the realistic depiction of gritty urban subjects. In ''Cliff Dwellers'', people spill out of

tenement A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, i ...

buildings onto the streets, stoops, and fire escapes. Laundry flaps overhead and a street vendor hawks his goods from his pushcart in the midst of all the traffic. In the background, a trolley car heads toward

Vesey Street Vesey Street ( ) is a street in New York City that runs east-west in Lower Manhattan. The street is named after Rev. William Vesey (1674-1746), the first rector of nearby Trinity Church. History The intersection of Vesey and West Streets wa ...

Formal analysis

The work was painted using a color system promoted by

Hardesty Gillmore Maratta Hardesty may refer to: Places United States * Hardesty, Maryland, also known as Queen Anne * Hardesty, Oklahoma People * Bob Hardesty (1931–2013), American educator * Brandon Hardesty (born 1987), American comedic performer and actor * Dav ...

, a paint manufacturer and color theorist. Maratta marketed oil paints in a range of colors produced by mixing primary colors in precise ratios; each color was given the value of a particular musical note, and artists were advised to use the colors in ways that would produce harmonious intervals and chords. Bellows had begun using the system sometime in 1909 or 1910. According to art historian Michael Quick, ''Cliff Dwellers'' was

his most complex exploration of the Maratta color system. It contained three chords: ''orange'', red-purple, and green-blue; ''blue-purple'', green, and red-orange; and ''yellow-green'', red, and blue ... But Bellows used the colors of each individual chord together in separate areas of the painting: the first chord in the foreground, the second primarily in the background building ... and the third in the red-brick buildings to the left and right...Quick, Michael, Jane Myers, Marianne Doezema, and Franklin Kelly. 1992. ''The Paintings of George Bellows''. New York: Harry N. Abrams. p. 38. .

Historical context

The painting, made in 1913, suggests the new face of New York. Between 1870 and 1915, the city's population grew from one-and-a-half to five million, largely due to immigration. Many of the new arrivals—Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Chinese—crowded into tenement houses on the Lower East Side—the area north of the Brooklyn Bridge, south of

Houston Street Houston Street ( ) is a major east–west thoroughfare in Lower Manhattan in New York City. It runs the full width of the island of Manhattan, from FDR Drive along the East River in the east to the West Side Highway along the Hudson River i ...

, and east of the

Bowery The Bowery () is a street and neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. The street runs from Chatham Square at Park Row, Worth Street, and Mott Street in the south to Cooper Square at 4th Street in the north.Jackson, Kenneth L. ...

. Among them were thousands of Eastern European Jews, who found temporary or permanent shelter along streets such as East Broadway, the setting for ''Cliff Dwellers''. The city had never seen this kind of density before. Within the context of ''Cliff Dwellers'' the audience is able to convey a sense of congestion, overpopulation and (primarily seen in the foreground) the impact of the city among the youth. Within the book ''The Paintings of George Bellows'', a historical account of how adamant “urban reformers” were during the early twentieth century as thousands of immigrants migrated to neighborhoods of New York. “The children in Bellows's Cliff Dwellers, innocent as they appear, exhibited no effects of the requisite “Americanizing” process urban reformers considered crucial to the maintenance of social order.”"Young, Mahonri Sharp and George Bellows. 1973. ''The Paintings of George Bellows''. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications. Paired with the scrutiny heaped upon immigrants was the fact that they were made to live in conditions, which were made unbearable by the toll of industrialization within these areas. Small and dense were the living quarters of many who worked in similar environments in factories. Small, dense, dark, which can easily be seen within the painting and helps promote the idea of how industrialization has impacted the working class lifestyle. New York Realists were called by critics as the "revolutionary black gang" and the "apostles of ugliness". A critic, referring to their depictions also conferred them the pejorative label

which became the standard term for this first important American art movement of the 20th century.

References

*''American Realism'', Gerry Souter, 1991, p. 110

*''George Bellows and Urban America'', Marianne Doezema, 1992, Yale University Press, p. 195

*''The Paintings of George Bellows.'', Young, Mahonri, Sharp and George Bellows, 1973, New York: Watson-Guptill Publications.

External links

* {{George Bellows Modern paintings 1913 paintings Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Paintings by George Bellows Paintings of children