Die Felsenbewohner

Bellows finished this in May 1913, the same year New York's Armory Show introduced America to European modern art. He was going the other way, painting the city right in front of him. Between 1870 and 1915 New York swelled from roughly 1.5 million people to 5 million, most of them immigrants, and many crowded into the tenements of the Lower East Side. Here they pour out of the buildings into the summer heat: laundry strung overhead, a pushcart vendor, a trolley bound for Vesey Street, children underfoot. Bellows made a darker print of the same scene for a socialist magazine, titled with a jab at wealthy readers who wondered why the poor did not simply leave the city for the countryside. This bright painted version went to gallery-goers instead.