
Wikimedia Commons • Public Domain
George Bellows completed this dramatic view of the Pennsylvania Station excavation around 1907-1908, showing workers dwarfed by the massive pit they had torn from Manhattan's Tenderloin district. Steam and smoke billow from the eight-acre hole while laborers toil in the winter cold. The scene has an almost infernal quality.
Bellows was associated with the Ashcan School, painters who documented urban America's grittier realities. His dark palette and vigorous brushwork capture both the excitement and ambivalence of rapid urban transformation. The grand station that rose here was demolished in 1963. This painting belongs to the Brooklyn Museum.
Other masterpieces from the American Realism movement

Edward Hopper, 1942
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Grant Wood, 1930
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Eastman Johnson, 1862
Brooklyn Museum, New York

Georgia O'Keeffe, 1930
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

John Singer Sargent, 1886
Tate Britain, London

Winslow Homer, 1876
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

John Singer Sargent, 1882
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston

John Singer Sargent, 1884
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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