I think what I like most about Oates’ tribute to Bellows is her perceptive attentiveness to individual images, while she speculates about his body of work. George Bellows was an early 20th-century American master; Joyce Carol Oates is much-honored American writer. It’s my opinion that writers rarely get artists right, but more than a few do—John Updike and Julian Barnes come to mind.
Oates’ small volume on Bellows (1995, The Ontario Review) is organized into very short chapters, each one of them about a single Bellows canvas. All of the 16 selected paintings are reproduced, in good color for their small reproduction size.
Oates comes close to being an “ideal observer,” as formulated by Adam Smith. She approaches Bellows with sensitive objectivity, she has a keen awareness of her chosen artifacts, and she certainly has many insights about the affective properties of his work. A Bellows painting is an object of deep pleasure in the fair mind of Oates.