?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
GEORGE BELLOWS Reducing, Small, Third Stone.
Lithograph, 1921. 277x217 mm; 10 7/8x8 5/8 inches, wide margins. Edition of 45. Signed in pencil, lower margin, and signed by the printer, Bolton Brown and inscribed "imp.", in pencil, lower left. A very good impression.
In the current lithograph, Bellows (1882-1925) returned to the subject of his two same-titled 1916 lithographs (see Mason 21 and 22), of which he wrote, "A study which started out in a humorous vein but developed into a drama of light and dark. The picture is as interesting upside down. Gymnastics before retiring are supposed to reduce the flesh. The husband is contented with his figure." When first appearing in The Masses, Socialist magazine with art direction by John Sloan, in November 1915, the subject was not without controversy. Art critic Royal Cortissoz claimed that Bellows was "dedicated too whole-heartedly to the depiction of what is prosaic in life to care a straw about what is poetic, what is beautiful." Finding small vignettes of beauty within the banal, Bellows believed that "there is no beauty without strength." Mason 79.
