Bellows’ River Rats At the Metropolitan Museum.
George Bellows’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum opened last week and is well-deserved, showing us for the first time in modern memory the full scale of what he achieved in twenty-something years. He died at 42. The success of his work is variable but it is clear that Bellows understood art the same way we present it here. I am particularly curious, though, about the large picture (above) that greets you at the entry to the exhibition, an early canvas called River Rats (1906). It depicts low-income children scampering about at water's edge below some massive earthworks. However, before I could even see the tiny figures, I was transfixed by what I thought was a giant rat turning towards us, one fang prominently bared. It is not exactly like a rat, just approximate, as though the rodent is in the process of appearing from the earth or disappearing back into it. The rat towers over the children but, given the title, it surely deserves some comment even if it is an accident. Yet nowhere in the exhibition nor in the catalogue itself is there any mention of it.1 The show was organized by curators at some of the world’s most respected institutions of art, The Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Royal Academy of Art in London.
I don't know what to think. I can understand how many people may not have seen Dante’s profile in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement or his self-portrait in the torso of St. Peter. It is perhaps not surprising that others have never turned Poussin’s Ordination a quarter-turn to the left, or even their own heads, to see the landscape become Christ's profile. Nor have curators at the Met ever seen the illusion of Poussin in Balthus’ masterpiece, The Mountain, a painting which has hung prominently in their galleries for many years. Art is full of very clever visual illusions that have never been seen by the public or the specialists. Perhaps the curators do see the giant rat but cannot bring themselves to believe that it can be a visual illusion, that somehow such visual trickery is beneath an artist. I may be wrong. Perhaps Bellows did not intend this rat but by not mentioning it the curators leave us with an even more startling conclusion: they have never even seen it.
1. George Bellows (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art) 2012, pp.47-8
Posted 20 Nov 2012: Visual MetamorphosisExhibitionsMuseumsVisual Perception
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Reader Comments
Perhaps the rats role is to keep the children (underclass) down. The rat could be doing the bidding of the “shiny people” (upper class) in the beautiful White House above the rat’s head and beyond the dark tenements. The shadow side of the privileged ones. Note my computer capitalized “white house” above and I am leaving it as it does look similar to the WH I ways!
Donna Dodderidge
26 Nov 2013