The Lone Tenement

Like many American artists of his generation, George Bellows was interested in the various urban construction projects that transformed New York City into an ultramodern metropolis. By the time he commenced work on The Lone Tenement in December 1909, he had completed four paintings devoted to the excavation site of the new Pennsylvania Station, culminating in the Gallery’s Blue Morning (painted in March 1909). The Lone Tenement represents the nearly complete Blackwell’s Island Bridge (now known as the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge or 59th Street Bridge), which passes over Blackwell’s Island (now known as Roosevelt Island), linking midtown Manhattan with the borough of Queens. Although the bridge was an impressive engineering feat and a symbol of progress, Bellows chose to focus instead on an abandoned, old tenement building and a group of desultory figures warming themselves by a fire. Such tenement buildings were associated with a host of social ills because of their impoverished and often immigrant residents. Bellows has imbued the composition with a sense of eerie wistfulness, recording the precarious positions of those who were being displaced to make way for the future.The impact of the painting is strengthened by the artist’s technical mastery. Paint is applied in variety of ways, from passages of thick impasto just to the left of the tenement building to a series of quick calligraphic marks used to describe a group of figures milling outside the building to the right. Bellows’s bold, expressive palette of oranges, golds, and violets, especially evident in the upper left quadrant of the canvas, is also distinctive.