Broadening the View of Bellows : A LACMA show that begins today uses 70 canvases to showcase the work of one of the foremost American painters of his generation

It irks Jean Bellows Booth that her father, painter and lithographer George Bellows (1882-1925), has often been remembered solely for his colorful, robust paintings of prize fights.

After all, besides such boxing scenes as Jack Dempsey knocked through the ropes and out of the ring by Luis Angel Firpo in “Dempsey and Firpo” (1924), Bellows painted dramatic landscapes and seascapes, energetic depictions of working-class urban dwellers, and warm and loving portraits of friends and family.

“He was interested in his family and all kinds of people. He loved little street kids, loved to paint them. He was a very outgoing person and had a broad range of interests,” Booth said in a recent interview at her La Jolla home overlooking the ocean. Anne, the older of two Bellows children, died in 1974.

“He read a lot--loved O. Henry. ‘Moby Dick’ was one of his favorites. He loved to sing, and he was very good at baseball, basketball and tennis. My father never did still lifes, but he painted everything else.”

Beginning today, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will broaden the perspective on the work of one of the foremost American painters of his generation with “The Paintings of George Bellows,” an exhibit of 70 canvases that spans his entire career. It is the first major retrospective of his work since 1979 and the first big West Coast show.

“It will be overwhelming to see all these paintings at once,” Booth said as she read the exhibition checklist. Born in 1915, she was brought up with her father’s work hanging all over the walls of the family home in the Gramercy Park area of New York City and their summer house in Woodstock. Artists and close friends Eugene Speicher, John Carroll and Charles Rosen also had homes in Woodstock. Bellows designed his Woodstock house and helped build it in 1922 on property that already contained an artist’s studio.

“He and John Carroll would sit on the roof with pillows tied to their bottoms, hammering the shingles on,” Booth recalled. “The building of the house was fascinating.”

Bellows, a native of Columbus, Ohio, had moved to New York in 1904 after withdrawing from Ohio State University. He enrolled in William Merritt Chase’s New York School of Art, studied with Robert Henri and became one of the group of artists known as the Ashcan School of art.

“They were considered terribly radical at the time,” Booth said. “Nobody was painting city streets or tenements or anything like they were doing. It was supposed to be all lovely ladies in parlors with their poodles.”

“This artist brought forth new realist images in American art, painting life among the lower classes in New York during the years from about 1907 through 1913,” said exhibition co-curator Michael Quick, LACMA’s curator of American art.

Quick added that Bellows paintings always suffer in reproduction because color is such a key element of his work. Black-and-white reproductions look dull; the color is never exactly right in color reproductions. “What the exhibition will show is gorgeous paintings gloriously painted. The colors are rich, the imagery strong. Only an exhibition conveys all those things in their full force,” Quick said.

From his student days until a few months before his death--at age 42 from peritonitis, the result of a ruptured appendix--Bellows painted at least 140 portraits. One-third of them depict family members, especially his wife, Emma, and daughters, Anne and Jean.

“I remember posing for all of them really, except the very little baby ones like the one at the Metropolitan,” Booth said, referring to “Jean With Blue Book and Apple,” which was painted in 1916 and is now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art collection.

Booth’s reminiscences of her extraordinary childhood are detailed and vivid.

“One of my earliest memories is going with my father, mother and sister to a parade of World War I veterans on 5th Avenue,” she said. “We sat in the bleachers or some grandstand and threw oranges to them. The wounded ones rode in convertible touring cars; the others were marching.

“I also remember my father pulling my sister and me around New York City in the snow on a little sled. I loved that.”

The first painting that Booth remembers posing for is “Elinor, Jean and Anna” (1920). “I was right in the middle with my grandmother and my Great-Aunt Fanny. Marjorie Henri, Robert Henri’s wife, played records for me on one of those wind-up Victrolas. That was supposed to keep me distracted while he painted me,” she said. “He painted very quickly, so it wasn’t a question of posing for weeks on end. I think he did ‘Lady Jean’ (1924) in about five days.”

For her 1921 portrait, “Jean in the Pink Dress,” her mother read “Black Beauty” aloud to keep her occupied. “That was a very sad story, and I started crying. My father was furious,” she said. “He said to my mother, ‘That’s a hell of a book to read her when I’m trying to paint.’ If you look closely at the portrait, you can see a little tear below my eye.”

“Emma and Her Children” (1923) is Bellows’ only finished portrait of his wife and both daughters. “We were all on a little horsehair sofa, and my poor sister was sitting on the scratchy horsehair. I had the catbird seat on my mother’s lap,” Booth recalled with delight.

“He got through with Emma and me in fairly fast time, but he had a very hard time with Anne and her head. Sometimes it was a hand, or sometimes it was a head, but in that particular painting, I remember he had a lot of trouble with Anne’s head. It didn’t satisfy him, so he took a lot longer to paint her.

“Then there was a big argument. We got paid for posing. There was a big argument because my sister was getting $10 for posing because she had to pose so much longer. I said that just because I was easy to paint, I saw no reason why I should be paid less. He agreed. He kept peace in the family. I don’t think Anne was too pleased.”

Booth said that when Bellows painted her or her sister, he didn’t mind if they wanted to look and see what he was doing. “Once in a while, he would ask me what I thought of the painting,” she said. “And I would take it very seriously, of course--decide what I thought was good and bad about it.

“I remember once he asked me what I thought and I said, ‘Well, that man, he’s sitting on the ground, but he doesn’t look like he’s sitting on anything. He just looks like he’s sitting on air.’ He said, ‘You’re right,’ so he painted a little mound under him. I probably remember that because he told me I was right. I can’t remember which painting it was.”

Bellows’ family did not see much of him when he was painting other than family portraits because he wanted to be alone, and he wanted it to be quiet.

“He built a little swimming pool by our house in Woodstock, and of course Anne and I would get in the pool and start screaming at each other. He’d come out of his studio furious and tell us to be quiet, that we were interrupting his train of thought in painting, which amazed me because he was quite noisy himself,” Booth recalled.

As children in a time before radio and television, Bellows’ daughters were often busy creating their own works of art. “We both drew all the time,” Booth said.

“We’d draw on the back of all his old lithograph papers of the prints that didn’t come out properly. Every now and then, he’d come and add to the drawings. That was always very exciting when he did that. I still have some of them.”

Bellows also instilled a love for baseball in his daughters. “He was captain of the baseball team at Woodstock. They used to play every Sunday behind the Catholic church,” Booth said. “Anne and I would go to every game, and we just loved it. All the artists would come and make really funny remarks about the players.

“It was the kind of thing where you had to win, something I’ve never really felt with the big league games. Even after he died, we used to go every Sunday to the baseball games for years.”

Booth also remembers that after father’s death, all of his friends continued to make a fuss about her and her sister.

“Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, was a great Bellows enthusiast. He invited Anne and me and Mother to a party at his house where we were going to meet Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and then they were going to show a special screening of her movie, ‘Sparrows.’

“Anne and I went to that party, and we met them. It was one of the big moments in my life. My sister and I never would have been invited if we hadn’t been our father’s children, and if he hadn’t died, and Frank Crowninshield wanted to do something really nice for those little Bellows girls.”

Booth’s chosen field was not art, but the theater. “You could say I paint houses. Like everything you see that’s painted in this room, I painted it. That’s as far as my art goes. I enjoy painting houses. My houses are never white. I’ve had red dining rooms, and I just love color. I think that life without color is just blah,” she said.

She began her theater work in summer stock in Woodstock fairly soon after she graduated from high school.

“I was in Leonard Sillman’s ‘New Faces of 1936’ with Imogene Coca. Van Johnson was a chorus boy in that show,” Booth said. “I was in about five Broadway shows altogether, but it was all during the Depression, the worst possible time to look for a job. The last play I did was ‘Happy Birthday,’ with Helen Hayes.”

During World War II, Booth helped open the Stage Door Canteen for serviceman in New York. Additionally, as a member of American Women’s Voluntary Services, she drove an ambulance.

“Whatever you wanted to do, you could do. You could even get marvelous jobs because all the men were in the Army.”

Just after the treaty in Europe was signed, she went to France, Belgium and Germany with the USO to entertain the army of occupation. “That was something to see--what was left of Germany after World War II,” she said.

Jean Bellows married Earl Booth in 1949 and, when they began to have children, she decided that “one career in the house was enough. I also kind of tired of the theater anyway.”

In the 1960s, the Booths moved with their four children to Los Angeles. Earl, a story editor, worked on such television shows as “Marcus Welby, M. D.,” “Judd for the Defense” and “Cannon.” Earl and Jean moved to La Jolla in 1986.

Booth said that when she lived in Los Angeles, people here were generally unaware of George Bellows. “It’s quite exciting for me to have him recognized now,” Booth said.

“It’s about time Bellows made it to California. But why couldn’t it have gone on 10 years ago when I was living in Los Angeles? It would have been so simple.”

“The Paintings of George Bellows” opens today and continues through May 10 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Call (213) 857-6000.