Art, literature & history
Reducing Exercises
1916
- Dating
- Exact year
- Held at
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
- Medium
- lithograph
- Dimensions
- Image: 44.5 x 42.1 cm (17 1/2 x 16 9/16 in.)
- Collection no.
- 1937.478
- Attribution
- By the artist
- Image rights
- CC0 1.0License details
George Bellows. Reducing Exercises. George Bellows; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Gift of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.. CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Full-frame proportional resize and JPEG compression.
Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art
About this artwork
Reducing Exercises — George Bellows. 1916.
Medium: lithograph. Dimensions: Image: 44.5 x 42.1 cm (17 1/2 x 16 9/16 in.).
Collection record: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.
Fueled by the advertising industry and the increasing popularity of movies, the ideal standard for women’s bodies began to evolve during the early 20th century, fostering a preference for more curvaceous profiles with thinner waists. Bellows’s Reducing Exercises presents a woman dutifully engaged in changing her physique while her male companion sleeps. When he first exhibited the print, the artist provided an accompanying quip: “Gymnastics before retiring are supposed to reduce the flesh. The husband is contented with his figure.”
Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.
Location checked Sep 10, 2026. This does not indicate whether the work is on display.