Barber bares all for major nudes display
A WORK by the artist George Bellows – one of the most significant American artists of the early 20th century – is the centrepiece of a major new exhibition at Edgbaston’s renowned Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
The Barber, at the University of Birmingham campus, last year acquired Nude, Miss Bentham (1906), an early masterpiece by Bellows, formerly owned by Andy Warhol.
It has now been hung alongside the on-loan Nude Girl, Miss Leslie Hall (1909) for the exhibition Bellows and the Body: The Real, the Ideal and the Nude, which opens this Friday.
It is the first time they have been hung together since 1910.
Bellows was a major figure in the New York-based ‘Ashcan School’, a loose group of artists whose models were often working men and women, street children and prostitutes, depicted in sidewalks, dockyards and boxing clubs.
A Barber spokesman said: “Bellows and the Body explores the role of the figure by the artist and his fellow Ashcanners – a take on modernism as seen through the prism of the human form.
“It reflects both their experience within the art-school life class and beyond, contrasting this with work from his pre-New York days, and with the art of contemporaries outside of the Ashcan School.”
For more details go to the Barber website at www.barber.org.uk