Volume 49, Number 13 · August 15, 2002
The Philadelphia Story
By Sanford Schwartz
Thomas Eakins: American Realist
Catalog of the exhibition organized by Darrel Sewell
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 18–September 15, 2002
Philadelphia Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 446 pp., $65.00
Walt Whitman wasn't known as an art critic, but when he said that Thomas Eakins 'is not a painter, he is a force,' he put his finger on both the allure of this artist and some of the confusion that exists over him. For many decades now there has been a blurring of Eakins the artist and Eakins the rock of integrity, the man who, whether wishing to make of his scenes and the figures within them a mathematically coordinated world, or insisting on rendering the exact anatomical nature of the model posing before him, or refusing to show his sitters in anything but their most characteristic, everyday expression, lent an ethical weight to the Realist movement of the nineteenth century. Eakins's very name has almost come to be synonymous with the thought that a life in the arts need not be divorced from a quest for moral fiber. His being fired from the directorship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in 1886, for his insistence that the loincloth be dropped from a male model in a class attended by women, remains one of the signal moments in American art history.
Review, 4375 words
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