Jordana Moore Saggese is Professor of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, author of
Although the painting Both Members of This Club (1909) by George Bellows—a member of a group of painters known as the Ashcan school—has been explicitly discussed in terms of its interactions with rhetorics of manhood (or even the artist’s progressive idealism), such analyses remain largely white, middle class, and heterosexual. The integration of boxing in the first decade of the twentieth century and the rise of the infamous Black heavyweight Jack Johnson certainly brought issues of race into the public arena, and we must do the same for Bellows’s work. This chapter demonstrates how the widespread racial tensions following Emancipation and Reconstruction played out between white and Black opponents, and within the fine arts, exploring how the visual culture of this period (including the work of Bellows) played a critical role in fomenting and even justifying racial violence.
Advertisement
