George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey’s (1909), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection © The Cleveland Museum of Art; image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Bellows with his palette and brush and a piece of canvas . . . evokes it all out of the inner intuition which is deeper and finer than all the schools and all the slums.

—Theodore Dreiser

I arose surrounded by Methodists and Republicans.
—George Bellows

Edmund Wilson, even in his early Marxist phase, was a keen critic of the visual arts, perceptive enough to prefer Charles Demuth to John Marin (whom he thought overrated) and to write a significant early appreciation of Georgia O’Keeffe. This was because his Marxism was not of the reductive sort that judged works of art solely according to their utility in the class struggle, although it did impel him to seek out the social implications of innovative art. Thus his remarkable review of the memorial exhibition of George Bellows, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1925.

Wilson placed Bellows among the cohort of postwar artists who chose to depict—and to devise an aesthetic strategy for depicting—“the more vulgar aspects of American life.” What particularly interested Wilson was the expressive resonance between subject matter and formal treatment: “The artist began audaciously to represent the American city in terms of its own crudeness, and the writer to describe the people in their own half-literate language.” He went