George Bellows

George Bellows made his name painting men hitting each other. His boxing pictures, done around 1909, show illegal club fights in smoky back rooms, bodies lunging out of the dark while the crowd leers up from below. Prizefighting was barely legal in New York, and that underground charge is part of the subject.

Bellows belonged to the loose group later called the Ashcan School, painters who took the gritty city, tenements, crowds, snow turning to slush, as fit material for serious art. He was a gifted athlete himself and nearly played professional baseball before choosing paint.

Late in his short career he returned to the ring with Dempsey and Firpo of 1924, catching the instant the heavyweight champion is knocked clean out of the ropes into the reporters' laps, a blow Bellows had watched from ringside at the Polo Grounds in New York. The next year he died at 42 of a burst appendix.