Peach Packing, Spartanburg County
The artist’s award-winning, hard-edged technique is apparent in Peach Packing. While composed in the Realist tradition encouraged at her Philadelphia alma mater, the picture also demonstrates Bell’s familiarity with modern art movements. The expressive use of bright hues, simplified forms, minimal and somewhat arbitrary chiaroscuro, and slightly distorted figures and perspective lend the painting a naïve quality that was celebrated among early twentieth-century artists. No doubt Bell’s saturated Gauguin-esque coloring and skewed perspective owe something to the landmark exhibitions featuring European Post-Impressionist and Cubist art that occurred at the Pennsylvania Academy while she was enrolled. And in both subject matter and execution, the painting is a Southern interpretation of the American Scene painting being contemporaneously explored by Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry.
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