The Coming Storm

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The Coming Storm

United States, 1916
Paintings
Oil on canvas
Frame: 32 x 38 1/16 x 2 1/2 in. (81.28 x 96.6788 x 6.35 cm) Canvas: 26 1/2 × 32 1/16 in. (67.31 × 81.44 cm)
Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection (18.1.1)
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

In 1911 Bellows began to summer in Maine....
In 1911 Bellows began to summer in Maine. During his visits there, until 1916, he moved increasingly away from the almost exclusively urban subject matter of his early career and turned toward landscape painting. The Coming Storm was painted during June 1916, when Bellows and his family were summering in remote Camden, Maine, with LEON KROLL. Early in their stay they were visited almost daily with storms, and Bellows’s paintings from June and July are among his most dramatic in their contrast and energetic brushwork. By this time he was systematically using the Maratta palette, and The Coming Storm is fairly strong in color despite its overcast tonality. In his record book the artist indicated the color scheme for his painting as follows: Yellow-Green 13.9.5.3.1, Yellow 11-7, Green 11, Green-Blue 9.1, Blue-Purple 9, Orange-Yellow 1, Red-Purple 5, Red-Orange 5 [colors indicated by initials in original] The numbers by each of the abbreviations of color names refer to the value of the hue that Bellows used. This system of assigning numbers to color values was established at a meeting in 1915 at which Bellows, Maratta, and others were present and which resulted in a chart of colors and values. It was one of several elaborations of the Maratta color system worked out in Henri’s circle.
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About The Era

The early twentieth century witnessed the transformation of the United States into a modern industrialized society and an international political power.

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The early twentieth century witnessed the transformation of the United States into a modern industrialized society and an international political power. By 1920 more than half of the country’s population lived in urban areas. Seeming to guarantee employment, the cities lured many farmers and African Americans from rural areas. In addition, between 1900 and 1920, 14.5 million immigrants from Europe, Russia, Mexico, and Asia settled here, primarily in urban centers. A new energy was channeled to such cities as New York and Chicago, as massive skyscrapers were erected to furnish much-needed office space and living quarters. Even West Coast cities were affected—the population of Los Angeles tripled between 1900 and 1910; its unplanned urban sprawl and dizzying speed were captured in the zany movies of the Keystone Cops, filmed on the streets of the city.


Art reflected these changing social and economic dynamics. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism were still popular. Yet other, more progressive ideas now challenged artists. A strong new commitment to realism emerged in literature and the fine arts.


In Philadelphia and New York, a group of artists centered around Robert Henri captured the vitality of urban American life. These realists depicted the hustle and bustle of city streets, the common pleasures of restaurants and various forms of entertainment. Critics dubbed these realists the “Ash Can School” because of their treatment of unidealized subject matter previously considered unattractive. These artists focused on the inhabitants of cities rather than the cities themselves. Their interest in people also led them to create a significant number of single-figure paintings, conveying the human side of the new America . During the 1910s and 1920s the realist celebration of America spread throughout the country, as artists recorded the neighborhoods and people that made their own cities distinct.

 
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Bibliography

  • About the Era.
  • Kim, Woollin, Jinmyung Kim, and Songhyuk Yang, eds. Art Across America. Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 2013.
  • Miller, Angela, and Chris McAuliffe, eds. America: Painting a Nation. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2013.
  • About the Era.
  • Kim, Woollin, Jinmyung Kim, and Songhyuk Yang, eds. Art Across America. Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 2013.
  • Miller, Angela, and Chris McAuliffe, eds. America: Painting a Nation. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2013.
  • Fort, Ilene Susan and Michael Quick.  American Art:  a Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.
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