Anecdote and the Painting of George Bellows

Excavation at Night (1908), George Bellows' second painting of the construction work undertaken for Pennsylvania Street Station, offers a dramatic depiction of the site that took up two full New York city-blocks. Bellows' decision to paint a nocturnal scene is vital to both the dramatic effect of the painting and its capacity to make an assertion about the ways in which the excavation could be perceived. In Electrifying America, David Nye suggests that the coming of electricity created the possibility of a new form of visual rhetoric. By making it possible to illuminate specific areas of the nocturnal city, electric light facilitated the privileging and deprivileging of certain spaces. By illuminating, and thus privileging, particular areas of the canvas, Bellows implements a similar rhetoric in Excavation at Night. Thus, illuminated by powerful electric lights, the snow covered far wall of the excavation and the row of buildings above it are placed in contrast, and possibly in opposition, with the man silhouetted by the light of the bonfire near the bottom edge of the canvas. The dramatic force of Bellows' “bravura” style raises the stakes in this contrast or opposition between the small-scale human activity around the fire and the large urban story of the excavation. In this article I intend to theorise Bellows' handling of smallness as an “anecdotal mode,” to suggest that “anecdote” may function both negatively and positively, and to show that this mode becomes particularly problematic when it is applied to city scenes.