ABSTRACT
In this provocative essay, Robert Haywood considers the boxing paintings of George Bellows in the context of American attitudes toward sports and masculinity in the early twentieth century. As a young artist in New York, Bellows resided first at the YMCA and later in close proximity to Sharkey’s Athletic Club, institutions that provided vastly different experiences of male athletic activity. Based on Bellows’s own experience and popular beliefs of the time, Haywood draws an important distinction between the illegal prizefight represented in this painting and pugilism as a legitimate sport practiced within the respectable environment of the YMCA, where participation in sports was thought to build character and strengthen the body.
Stag at Sharkey’s captures the illicit excitement of the prizefight from the standpoint of the spectator-voyeur who enters this decadent world in search of danger and excitement. Haywood understands boxing as a complex enactment of power and aggression, where the male body becomes a site encoded with signs of not only physical strength but also sexual potency. The evident fascination with the spectacle of violence captured by Bellows is connected both to conflicted notions of masculine identity at the turn of the century and to the homoerotic implications of boxing itself as a ritual of desire coupled with physical brutality.
