The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, outlawing alcoholic beverages and ensuring nationwide suffrage for women, were ratified within one year of each other- in 1919 and 1920, respectively. Prohibition and the fight for women's rights were allied from the mid-nineteenth century on. Bellow's wrenching image of The Drunk appeared in the May 1924 issue of Good Housekeeping, with an article title "Why We Prohibit," by Mabel Potter Daggett.

George Bellows was recognized as a major art figure early in his career and won numerous awards before he was 30. After he arrived in New York he began painting in the style of the "Ashcan School" which emphasized working in a gray tonality. Much of his work is emotional with serious themes that characterized much of his work.

His talent brought him to the attention of Robert Henri, the leader of the Ashcan school of painting, and a teacher with great influence throughout his career. Ashcan painting reflected social realism, freedom of execution, and a social radicalism and Bellow's added his own interpretation and achieved great power and expressiveness in his work. Although Bellows didn't exhibit with the Ashcan group of artists known as "The Eight," his work added its unique muscle and spirit to the style with which the group was associated.

Regrettably, his promising career came to an abrupt and untimely end when he died at 42 of an attack of acute appendicitis.

A newly sharpened social and political awareness dominated the prints and drawings of the period between 1912 and 1948. Artists of the period felt a strong affinity for the common people and argued that prints should be not just for the wealthy but treated, as they once had been, as a product for the many. Stylistically, many artists chose a modified realism as a means of expression more accessible to the general public, rather than the European avant garde.

Technically, lithography, which could more easily yield larger editions than other original media, flourished. Other methods, such as the silkscreen, were transmuted from commercial use to fine arts media for the production of large, colorful, and inexpensive editions. Such new concepts of the production, marketing, and reproduction of original works of art offered the public access to an entire generation's artistic output and promoted the relevance of fine art to everyday life. In Mexico, in a striking parallel manifestation of this same populist impulse, a vibrant public art reflecting the life and history of the Mexican people sprang up in the 1920s as a cultural legacy of the Mexican Revolution.

Medium : Reproduction made from a scan of a lithographic print

Created/Published : Either 1923 or 1924

Creator : George Bellows, artist, 1882 - 1925

Part of the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Foundation Collection and housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: cph3g06716