Americana

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2002 by Loughery, John

Another aspect of Eakins' ideas about reality, and hence his brand of realism, can be found in his approach to anecdote. The desire to turn experience into anecdotal material is a constant in life. Acting on that impulse doesn't have to carry any great weight of meaning or consequence-yet, indulged in too often, it will trivialize experience, turning something real into something tidy and banal. In art, the lure of anecdote always presents serious risks, and a good deal of nineteenthcentury American art succumbed to that drive to explain and amuse. Eakins' Home Scene (1871) perhaps skirts closest to the edge on that count. A woman has interrupted her piano playing to observe a child at her feet on the rug, oblivious to her, drawing on a chalkboard. In other hands, the word "heart-warming" would be inescapable. But in this case, the woman's expression is somewhat hard to read. I don't even find it maternal enough to state definitively that this is a mother-and-child scene. (She looks aunt-ish to me.) Nor are her thoughts about the child, or her relationship to her music, so easy to divine. I love this side of Thomas Eakins, this refusal to over-narrate, this wish to stick with a moment and an image that can't be neatly turned into something it isn't. Similarly, Cowboys in the Bad Lands (1888) offers no ammunition for the Right or the Left in the culture wars about depictions of the West, a rare experience on that subject, and A May Morning in the Park (1880) is as much about the horses (an Eakins specialty) and the lush greenery as it is about the riders. Baby at Play (1876) is more absorbing for its colors, perfect composition, and arrangement of diagonals than for its mundane topic, and Eakins' singers (Singing a Pathetic Song and The Concert Singer) may be possessed of made-to-order human-interest stories just beneath their tremulous surface, but we aren't getting them, thank God. We are getting something open to speculation, if you wish, but less packaged and less knowable, more like life itself.

Thomas Eakins' strongest claim on our attention today-after the emotional severity of The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic-lies in his portraiture, of course, and in that regard the Philadelphia retrospective was immensely satisfying. A brown-black or scumbled background in the portraits of Maud Cook, Letitia Wilson Jordan, Frank Linton, Louis Kenton, William Macdowell, the painter's father, and his wife Susan, among many other sitters (himself included, in a 1902 self-portrait), forces us to concentrate on some of the most thoughtful, serious faces in American art and presses home the point of an almost maniacal concern with anatomy, worked and reworked through sketches, studied exhaustively from life and explicit photographs. Of equal importance, the portraits tell us that there was a viable middle ground between an academic realist tradition that had become airless and mechanical and the Romantic's legacy of brighter color and high drama. Giving in to sensuality for Eakins was adding a little more red to his browns in his portraits of local Catholic prelates or going so far as to divide the focus equally between Amelia Van Buren's pensive face and her dress, part solid-pink and part print, and the intricately carved chair she sits on. Yet, strangely, we know we aren't in the presence of a latter-day Puritan. We aren't being denied a true physical presence, a quiet but passionate acceptance of bodies as bodies-lines, limbs, organs, lips, all-seeing eyes. Could we have guessed the story about the nude male models and the shocking photograph collections if we didn't already know? Possibly. If anything, Eakins seemed to hint that he sees clothes as an obstacle to knowledge and depth or will accept them as a social convention of no more consequence than the decor and trivial background touches he has more easily discarded from his work.