Hilarie M. Sheets reports on the retrospective exhibition of works by of George Bellows at The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through October 8, 2012.

Sheets notes that "curator Charles Brock positions Bellows as a more forward-thinking modernist… 'The boxing pictures could be characterized as a type of Action Painting, 40 years before the term was coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg,' says Brock. 'The movements of the fighters and the physical reality of blood and sinew are virtually indistinguishable from painterly gestures embedded in the pigments themselves.' "