George Bellows - Men of the Docks

This painting is all about heft and scale – the power and might of capital, commerce, industry, and the human cost of economics: the tough and precarious lives of dockers as cogs in this immense transactional machine. It’s a big canvas at 114 x 161cm, depicting a large steamship, its prow cropped to fit into the painting’s frame and its stern jutting commandingly towards the imposing New York skyline. The ship’s side, a huge grey and orange steel wall, soars above our viewpoint and recedes into the distant flow of the East River.

George Bellows, Men of the Docks, 1912, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

It is an awesome - in its literal sense rather than its linguistically inflated present-day sense, sight, even sublime (in its Romantic-aesthetic sense). It is the kind of painting I would have found exciting as a kid. It was painted at a time when great shipping lines were competing for supremacy (The Titanic, that much larger and totemic vessel of the age, sank during its maiden voyage the same year this painting was made). A tugboat, spouting steam and smoke into the cold air, is dwarfed by the imperious larger vessel, having just nudged it deferentially into its dockside position, with a cargo tender in front. A similarly smoking sister tugboat traverses the distant shoreline to establish the colossal scale of the tall buildings behind it and the river as a commercial expressway serving the mighty metropolis.

The white painted superstructure of the ship, with its jaunty tricolour funnel, speaks of its unseen privileged passengers, their imagined wealth and finery so unlike the grimy and impoverished labouring longshoremen in the foreground. The towering ship symbolises an idea of progress and enterprise, affluence, and abundance. Meanwhile the men on the dock exist at the wrong end of capitalism’s winner-takes-all system, men who struggle to eke out a living, men who work in the toughest conditions. These men feel the cold coming from the frozen waters, with hands in pockets for warmth, they await a call for a day’s labour and look towards the figure on the right, possibly one who has been ostracised from their group or a rejected hireling, now expelled into the shade.

On the right we see two magnificent grey-white dray horses, already harnessed for pulling. There is a nobility to these large beasts, looming tall, docilely submitting to the demands made of them. There is an affinity between them and the men, both representative of atavistic animal muscle that contrasts with the steam power and mechanisation of the modern age.

Bellows lays on his paint thickly and with the brawn of vigorous brushstrokes, as if in effortful sympathy with the physicality of the men, horses, river, and climate he depicts. This technique blunts the definition of the faces we can see, reducing them to cartoonish distortions. And yet this is not inappropriate to the subject. The tallest and burliest of the figures in particular, looking like a heavyweight who has stepped out of the ring of one of the artist’s iconic boxing match paintings, has been brutally disfigured by labour. His legs-wide-apart stance and oversized head, his long jaw, staring eye and grimly set mouth make of him a frightening cyclops, ready to take on anyone around him who would challenge his physical authority in this dog-eat-dog environment. Most of the other figures stare in the same direction towards the man walking away slump-shoulderdly – we can’t tell whether they feel a sense of comradely compassion or straightforward schadenfreude. After all, any rejection of another implies a stronger chance of employment for those remaining.

In fact, there is a lot of looking in this painting but not necessarily as much seeing. The foregrounded figures are day-labouring men from the ‘undesirable’ indigent classes, often unseen and unnoticed by those above them. On the Brooklyn side of the river (the Brooklyn bridge is visible at top right) they would be invisible to the people in the sunlit commercial buildings on the opposite shore in swankier lower Manhattan, home to the powerhouses of the financial district and Wall Street. They would be below the consideration of any passenger that happened to look through one of the ship’s many portholes or from the captain’s bridge. Even the barge to the left of the painting looks like it has blank eye-like windows which seem to stare impassively and unfeelingly towards the dockside action.

As well as looking, the painting tells us about feeling. Not just the emotional feelings of isolation, exclusion, hopefulness, or fear but physical feeling. Snow and ice lie under the feet of men and horses, and it edges the barge and the tugboat on what looks like a numbingly cold but bright day. A strong diagonal shadow is cast by the warehouse on the left as if to signal the looming and callous disregard that the movement and storage of goods entail for those obliged to find work in such menial functions. That diagonal runs as a baleful parallel to the lines of the ship’s sides, bathed in more blessed sunlight.

The painting conjures a keen sense of separation. The men huddle but one of their number becomes an outcast. They in turn are separated both from the ship they will unload but also from the glamour of a better life over the water. That water is hostile, a dangerous tidal strait whose strong and fast lowing current threatens freezing or drowning them. It carries its own commercial traffic but that involves interchanges, dealings and affairs, the access to which is beyond their reach. They are separated from the vessels that might ferry them and the Brooklyn Bridge, a much more feasible way out, is pictured only faintly, like some improbable mirage.

As an ‘Ashcan School’ artist, one of the group notionally led by his art teacher Robert Henri determined to paint the harsh truth of  life for the urban poor in this period rather than prettified gentility, Bellows knew that the life of a docker was one characterised by exhausting graft, privations, long hours, injury, danger (concern for health and safety unheard of), extreme job insecurity, extortion, victimisation, bribery, shake-downs and poor pay rates. Most dock workers were immigrants (so separated from their birthplaces too), often taking the only work they could get. And yet at the same time, New York was experiencing a huge economic boom, its development emblematized by its skyscraper construction, while automobiles and streetcars were rapidly displacing horse-drawn vehicles on its gilded avenues. To the politically left-leaning Bellows, such inequality, such separation between the haves and the have-nots was painful to witness.

His painting is a powerful reminder that human agency – the men on the docks have so little, the First-Class ship passengers and captains of industry have so much, is what divides us. The men do the heaving and lifting (if hired), the physical moving using muscle and sinew, but ironically their strength is puny compared to the tycoons who can cause ships to be built and moved around the globe using nothing but intangible financial instruments.

The painting dwells in the sense of unfathomable otherness that exists between these domains, and in the feeling that diverse forms of heft can co-exist but remain eternally estranged.