Cliff Dwellers. Cliff Dwellers is an oil on canvas painting by George Bellows that depicts the colorful crowd on New York City's Lower East Side, on what appears to be a hot summer day.
Its dimensions are by inches, and it is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which acquired it in 1916. The painting is a representative example of the Ashcan School, a movement in early-20th-century American art that favored the realistic depiction of gritty urban subjects.
In Cliff Dwellers, people spill out of tenement buildings onto the streets, stoops, and fire escapes. Laundry flaps overhead and a street vendor hawks his goods from his pushcart in the midst of all the traffic.
In the background, a trolley car heads toward Vesey Street. The work was painted using a color system promoted by Hardesty Gillmore Maratta, a paint manufacturer and color theorist.
Maratta marketed oil paints in a range of colors produced by mixing primary colors in precise ratios; each color was given the value of a particular musical note, and artists were advised to use the colors in ways that would produce harmonious intervals and chords. Bellows had begun using the system sometime in 1909 or 1910. According to art historian Michael Quick, Cliff Dwellers was his most complex exploration of the Maratta color system. It contained three chords: orange, red-purple, and green-blue; blue-purple, green, and red-o
Its dimensions are by inches, and it is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which acquired it in 1916. The painting is a representative example of the Ashcan School, a movement in early-20th-century American art that favored the realistic depiction of gritty urban subjects.
In Cliff Dwellers, people spill out of tenement buildings onto the streets, stoops, and fire escapes. Laundry flaps overhead and a street vendor hawks his goods from his pushcart in the midst of all the traffic.
In the background, a trolley car heads toward Vesey Street. The work was painted using a color system promoted by Hardesty Gillmore Maratta, a paint manufacturer and color theorist.
Maratta marketed oil paints in a range of colors produced by mixing primary colors in precise ratios; each color was given the value of a particular musical note, and artists were advised to use the colors in ways that would produce harmonious intervals and chords. Bellows had begun using the system sometime in 1909 or 1910. According to art historian Michael Quick, Cliff Dwellers was his most complex exploration of the Maratta color system. It contained three chords: orange, red-purple, and green-blue; blue-purple, green, and red-o
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