Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist

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Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist Details

Thomas Eakins is widely considered one of the great American painters, an artist whose uncompromising realism helped move American art from the Victorian era into the modern age. He is also acclaimed as a paragon of integrity, one who stood up for his artistic beliefs even when they brought him personal and professional difficulty--as when he was fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art for removing a model's loincloth in a drawing class.Yet beneath the surface of Eakins's pictures is a sense of brooding unease and latent violence--a discomfort voiced by one of his sitters who said his portrait "decapitated" her. In Eakins Revealed, art historian Henry Adams examines the dark side of Eakins's life and work, in a startling new biography that will change our understanding of this American icon. Based on close study of Eakins's work and new research in the Bregler papers, a major collection never fully mined by scholars, this volume shows Eakins was not merely uncompromising, but harsh and brutal both in his personal life and in his painting. Adams uncovers the bitter personal feuds and family tragedies surrounding Eakins--his mother died insane and his niece committed suicide amid allegations that Eakins had seduced her--and documents the artist's tendency toward psychological abuse and sexual harassment of those around him.This provocative book not only unveils new facts about Eakins's life; more important, it makes sense, for the first time, of the enigmas of his work. Eakins Revealed promises to be a controversial biography that will attract readers inside and outside the art world, and fascinate anyone concerned with the mystery of artistic genius.

Reviews

Henry Adams begins this book by arguing that the admiration of Thomas Eakins by his supporters in the art world (including fellow artists) is marked by excessive hero-worship and failure to confront uncomfortable truths about him. He writes that the first Eakins biography, by Lloyd Goodrich, suppressed negative detail in favor of building up a heroic image of Eakins, which lingers to this day.The Goodrich book relied heavily on the cooperation of Eakins’s widow, Susan Macdowell Eakins. She was naturally determined to defend her husband against what she saw as unfair attacks on him. Thus, Adams describes Goodrich’s inclusion of the good and exclusion of the bad, with supporting evidence. Detailed analysis of how Goodrich did this is one of the strengths of Eakins Revealed. But in his zeal to correct this imbalance, Adams builds his own mythology out of Freudian speculation, frequent innuendo, and almost comically distorted interpretations of Eakins’s paintings.Adams uses Freudian ideas to support his analysis of Eakins’s “secret life.” He admits that Freud’s “concepts grew increasingly less accurate” as he generalized from them, but also states that “it is not necessary to believe Freud’s theories to accept the fundamental argument” of Eakins Revealed. But much of Adams’s argument does indeed depend on Freud’s speculations, and if we delete Freud from the book’s logic (which we should do), the result is a much-weakened case.For Adams, Eakins arouses suspicion because there is no surviving record of his mentioning Ella Crowell’s suicide. Disregarding the possibility that such mentions could have been lost or destroyed, the only evidence Adams provides is that Eakins did not mention Ella’s suicide in surviving letters he wrote to his wife and to the physicist Henry Rowland in the months following the event.It’s likely that Eakins and his wife would have discussed the death in person and not needed to do it in letters, but Adams doesn’t mention this obvious possibility. As for the letters to Rowland: why would Eakins discuss this family tragedy in letters to a man completely outside the family? Yet on the basis of this flimsy “evidence,” Adams writes that this “suggests that [Eakins] was deliberately avoiding the subject, and implies an element of subterfuge.”Describing an outdoor photograph Eakins made of Ella that is slightly blurred, Adams disregards all possible reasons for the photo’s condition except one. He says that Ella is “trapped” between Eakins and the tree behind her, that she felt “hunted” by Eakins, and was trying to get away as he took the picture.Adams finds Eakins’s portrait of the young Ella in Baby at Play “disturbing” because the rag doll she has discarded in favor of playing with her blocks “looks like the victim of a murder or rape.” How many of us have seen just such a doll left lying on the floor by a small child distracted by a new toy? Could Eakins have been simply aiming for realism with the picture? Not for Adams, who converts this detail into a sinister ploy by an artist with much darker themes in mind.This innuendo and inquisition-style argumentation goes on and on. Eakins is suspicious because he wanted to paint models in the nude. But he is also suspicious because he painted Lillian Hammitt fully clothed. Ella Crowell’s parents regard her as a chronic liar and fabricator of stories. By Adams’s own account, Ella was “probably bipolar” and according to numerous sources “was unhappy, insecure and temperamental,” and she “may have been manic-depressive.” But, miraculously, Adams tells us that Ella comes to live at the Eakins home “in an apparently normal state,” and Eakins is suspiciously hiding his complicity in her suicide because he doesn’t mention it in surviving letters he wrote in the months following her death.Adams states that “the issue of incest pervades Eakins’s life” and that the accusation of incest was “repeatedly lodged against him.” Of the seven items he lists in support of these claims, only two involve accusations that Eakins committed incest: Frank Stephens’s claim that he committed incest with his sister Margaret, and his niece Ella Crowell’s claim that he touched her sexually.Regarding the Stephens accusation, Margaret was dead when Stephens made his claim, and there is no evidence that she ever made such a claim against her brother. Regarding Ella’s claim, her parents regarded her as a chronic liar and fabricator of stories, but Adams of course decides that in this case she was telling the truth.The other five claims about Eakins and incest derive from Adams’s Freudian interpretations of Eakins’s art and from his distortion of the meaning of the word incest. For example, he accuses Eakins of incest with Addie Williams, a relative of the Crowells, on the grounds that others assumed he was having an affair with her. Even if this were true, it would not be incest to have an affair with a non-blood relative of your brother-in-law.Indeed, Adams states that nineteenth century artist Bruce Crane did not commit incest when he married his stepdaughter because “it did not involve an individual with whom he was genetically linked.” In yet another contradiction, however, Adams includes this rumored (and unproven) “affair” with a woman not genetically linked to Eakins to show how incest “pervades” his life.Adams seems clueless when his own evidence contradicts claims he makes in the book. At one point he tells us that in photographs Eakins’s eyes “never seem to engage the viewer or the camera directly.” But within a few pages of this statement are two photographs of Eakins that clearly show him looking intently and directly at both the camera and the viewer. Adams routinely manipulates interpretations of Eakins’s art to fit his biases. For example:• He states that the fan held by the sitter in Miss Amelia Van Buren is a symbol of a penis, put there as a “sly pun” by Eakins to communicate to us that women are “defective, inferior versions of men.” Women with fans are a frequent subject in art of the past. Should we now go back and apply phallic interpretations to them? Are all fans in paintings phallic? Some fans? Or just those of Eakins?• Discussing the plaster relief “Arcadia,” Adams turns it into a Freudian Eakins family portrait. He says that the nude figure playing the aulos is Eakins, and “his aulos can also be seen as a metaphor for phallic exposure, an assertion of male dominance.” The other five figures are, respectively, Eakins’ sisters, father and mother. And since the musician and woman at the rear are both nude, and since now through Adams’s Freudian lens we see them as Eakins and his mother, we are invited to see the real meaning of the piece as “Eakins’s relationship with his mother.” What’s more: “If so, surely it is intriguing that both Eakins and his mother are shown naked.” Symbolic incest anyone?• Perhaps the most comic part of Adams’s case is his straight-faced disquisition on the differences between male and female buttocks. If a woman nude in an Eakins painting has a slender behind, it’s not because the model herself was slim, but because Eakins wants to blur her gender identity. If a male bather in “Swimming” has rounded buttocks, Eakins wants to blur his gender identity as well. For Adams, these cases demonstrate that Eakins is deeply conflicted about gender differences, or is trying to confuse us about the differences and to impose a more generalized gender confusion with his art. Of course Adams’s entire argument relies on arbitrary assumptions about the physical appearance of the female and male buttocks, which in both genders can vary widely from slender to obese.Despite his initial claim that we don’t need to accept Freud’s theories to accept his book’s argument, by the last chapter Adams is saying that “[i]f we accept some of Freud’s fundamental principles. . .it becomes clear that” all of his book’s “themes are fundamentally connected.” The Gross Clinic is about Eakins’s fear of castration. The Agnew Clinic “is related to the fear that women are castrated and thus defective men.” Even Eakins’s portraits deal with castration because they “so often portray figures who are sexually androgynous.” (It’s the buttocks argument reappearing in different clothes, so to speak.)Goodrich, Adams says, “reported information very selectively. . .even deliberately altering facts to support his view of Eakins’s character.” With this sentence, unfortunately, Adams could very well be describing his own approach in this book.

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