Collections: American Art

George Wesley Bellows (American, 1882–1925). Pennsylvania Station Excavation, circa 1907–8. Oil on canvas, 31 3/16 x 38 1/4 in. (79.2 x 97.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, A. Augustus Healy Fund, 67.205.1

A forceful example of George Bellows's expressive Realist mode, this painting of the vast excavation begun by 1903 to accommodate New York City's Pennsylvania Station reveals the artist's determination to break new ground in American subject matter. The transformation of the densely populated area between Thirty-first and Thirty-third Streets from Seventh to Ninth Avenues into a gaping expanse was shockingly dramatic, and Bellows, recently arrived from the Midwest, undertook the challenge to represent this unprecedented view of the city's functioning underbelly. He adopted an elevated, westward-facing vantage point that emphasized the depth of the pit, an effect enhanced by the dark perimeter wall and the looming silhouette of a building. Allowing his own emotional response to the scene to inform his choices in composition and color, Bellows invested the scene with an almost infernal quality, with the hulking forms of the digging machinery massed near the dark center of the snowy hole, surrounded by small orange fires and rising clouds of smoked touched with blue accents. Like actors on an epic stage, the figures of workers stand dwarfed by the scale of the mammoth industrial site.