ART: Regarding George Bellows' Cliff Dwellers

Here's contemplating George Bellows' Cliff Dwellers of NYC's Lower East Side: A steeper, more sheer and more austere cliff-side dwelling is hard to come by. This is totally unlike the Bonde Cliff I know. And yet there's an unmistakable poesy in this sweeping visual menagerie, a sunny ambience of a kind. Some sort of pent-up communal energy all over the air, and all the place. Tell-tale pixels of premature decay amid all that optimistic acceptance of things; of things as they appear to be right now. Of an invisible time-piece which routes and re-routes every desire, 'watches' all movement. Not visible, though, is any amount of sticky raw earth. Nor the hand of the glass-maker. Nor Batman's cape.