1916
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Splinter Beach is a 1916 by George Bellows, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see kids playing on a broken wooden dock, their clothes patched and bare feet dangling over dark water. Bellows painted this spot on the East River where poor families sent their children to cool off. The city called it a problem; he showed it as just another summer day. No heroes, no pity—just light on splintered planks and the smell of salt. Look up other paintings of america from the same years to see how artists handled the same streets.
During George Bellows’s first decade in New York City, starting in 1904, newspapers ran many stories about the “social problem” of the urban poor, reporting that the city’s tenement district lacked cleanliness and order. Drawn to this unvarnished side of city life, Bellows made several images of the public docks along the East River that were unofficial places of recreation for the city’s tenement children. Both Splinter Beach and River-Front feature, without sentimentality, children that display their nakedness unabashedly. Disturbingly, both images feature fully clothed adults observing or…
Splinter Beach was located under the Brooklyn Bridge, the underside of which can be seen in this image.
Read the full account in the museum source.
George Wesley Bellows (August 12 or August 19, 1882 – January 8, 1925) was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City.
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