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Books surveyed:
Henry Adams, Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Philip Dacey, The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins. Cincinnati, Ohio: Turning Point, 2004.
In America, most people don’t regard art as a proper profession for a grown man. They never have. From earliest days, the people who washed up here distrusted the open sensuality of paint, the love of beauty, the miscegenation of mind and body, that make up artwork. The business of America was business, and art was funny business.
Art’s still different here from how it is in Europe: both more careerist (in one strain), and more absurd, visionary, and isolated (in another). We veer and tack between Thomas Kincaid and Henry Darger. Nowadays, since the prevalence of the MFA program, there’s more professionalism in the cutting edge but that’s mostly just Kincaid in a Darger mask—carefully calibrated “madness” that slots into certain cultural receptors, producing mild pleasure among the enthusiasts. But be that as it may, American art is different from art elsewhere—we’ve never really figured out what it’s good for, or at least there’s no consensus on the matter.
American Genesis
It took a long time for anything like an American tradition to get started. The Armory Show (1913), commonly thought to establish such a native tradition, showcased both new European art and the art of a new American generation. Of the older Americans, only Albert Pinkham Ryder was included. The critic Charles Caffin wrote of him that “’Old Man Ryder’ . . . is much nearer to the modern expression of intellectualized emotion than all but a few of the young men.”
Other contemporary comments on the show brought up Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer as “moderns” who could have been included, especially given the perception, which Caffin recorded, that “science” was the new genius of the age. These three were the painters’ painters of the era, and remain so. Homer (1836-1910) was the first; his lack of European airs, his background in illustration for newspapers and magazines, and his determinedly American subjects joined with his startling sense of presence to bring a new atmosphere into the imitative American scene. Ryder (1847-1917) was considered a good grey founder of this truly American tradition. His work was read as modernist, but it had developed as an eccentric and late Romantic offshoot, an anachronism formed by a peculiar life. Eakins (1844-1916) is the next in the pantheon: again, a very traditional painter, with reactionary views, whose work became beloved of the moderns and celebrated as iconoclastic.
What these three painters share (besides the important bifurcation of stylistic origins from stylistic attributions), was the fact of their odd bodies—or rather, their odd desires. Homer was apparently asexual (as Peter Schjeldahl notes in a recent New Yorker article (Aug. 8)). He holed up on the Maine coast, painted a lot of water, men, boats, ducks, deer, and other fauna, and apparently took no sexual interest in anyone or anything. As biographers note, Ryder was another odd duck and loner--a wanderer of New York streets by night, recluse and lover of beauty who lived in incredible filth, a man who had the occasional flirtation but apparently never had a sexual life.
A Secret Life
Eakins Revealed, by Henry Adams, is an exhaustively researched account of Thomas Eakins’ career in reference to his private life. Adams makes a clear case for a seriously bent Eakins: a virginal and prudish compulsive exhibitionist; a misogynist compelled to touch women’s genitals; a man tragically formed by a particularly brutal Freudian family romance. He was the eldest child in his family and the only boy. Encouraged to lord it over his younger sisters, he was also made the primary caretaker for his manic-depressive mother before her death (attributed to “exhaustion from mania”) at 52. His stern and withholding father allowed no one to speak at the dinner table. The house of his childhood had its shutters closed most of the time. He lived in that house (with a few brief journeys away) all his life.
Adams recounts that Eakins apparently had an “incestuous” relationship with his favorite sister Margaret, who was, says Adams, a “boyish girl.” They slept together, but apparently did not have sex. After her death from typhus he invited her best friend to live with him and his wife Susan (they seem to have had a singularly cold marriage, which remained childless). Eakins had, also, two relationships with very young women who committed suicide as a result. One of these girls was the daughter of his sister Caroline, Ella Crowell, who lived with him and modeled for him. She accused him of forcing her to pose nude, spanking her when she would not, and handling her genitals in a way that was profoundly shaming. Ella shot herself in the head with the gun Eakins had given to her family (Eakins was apparently a bit of a gun nut—he had a lot of them, and often carried a pistol. Sometimes he threatened people with it). Another young woman, Lillian Hammit, his former student and model, became unhinged, showed up at his door calling herself “Mrs. Eakins,” and also eventually killed herself.
Adams’ book turns previous Eakins scholarship upside down, contradicting almost everything asserted in Lloyd Goodrich’s standard biography. Far from being an artist with early native promise, Eakins struggled to learn his trade. When he went to Paris to study, he joined Gerome’s Paris atelier, but never finished the standard course of study, never produced an Academy piece. He was dogged in his pursuit of skill, and could work compulsively on the details of layout and construction of a painting until he got it right, but was no “natural.’ Goodrich describes the “expressiveness” of Eakins’ portraits, but Adams points out that sitters in these portraits are made more expressionless, affectless, worn, and unprepossessing than they were in real life. And though Goodrich characterizes him as “honest,” he was instead driven to alter his portrayals of the world, including his portrait subjects, according to his compulsions.
Adams goes to great trouble to brush away the boosterish glitter with which Goodrich, the canonical Americanist of art history, had adorned Eakins’ life and work. Goodrich had had access to papers (the “Bregler Papers”) concerning the central scandal of Eakins’ life: his firing from his job at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Goodrich stated that the offense was trivial (the removal of a loincloth from a male model in a class of women) and that it was merely a case of Eakins’ bohemianism running afoul of Philadelphia prudery. Subsequently, these papers disappeared. When they were rediscovered, Adams gained access to them. They revealed that Goodrich had certainly whitewashed the affair and concealed its deeper and darker roots.
The papers—letters and personal accounts—make plain that Eakins’ relationships to his family, his students, his models and sitters, and his friends were odd-–even brutish and sadistic at times--and that Goodrich, seeking a founding hero for American art, had glossed over those parts of Eakins’ life that would have, perhaps, distracted from the real greatness of the paintings. Has this altered story impaired our ability to see what the paintings actually are? The reason to read Adams’ book, despite its length and its obsessive dwelling, in great detail, on a few themes, is that he does eventually make a case for a new reading of the paintings, a reading that recalibrates them and provides new ways to understand their mysterious power.
For a recent example of a book that relies on Goodrich’s view of Eakins, see Philip Dacey’s Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins. This very moving poem cycle portrays Eakins as a bighearted emotionally generous man simply too large for his provincial setting. The cycle is very satisfying in its telling of this familiar story; we love that “Lust for Life” stuff, that “Horse’s Mouth” view of bohemianism as a refuge from ordinary life—kind of like running away with the circus. Nice to know that someone’s done it. But the simplification of the story does harm as well. It trivializes the lives of those depicted in Eakins’ work; it denies the true heroism of Eakins’ attempts to paint his way through or out of his own malignity and madness. It’s a much simpler story, easier to celebrate, but it’s not the real one.
Lives and Works
How does all this emphasis on the life of the artist help in our understanding of the work? Is it just gossip? In the case of Adams’ book, I’d say no. Adams notes that Eakins has been seen as America’s first “modern” artist, despite his reactionary views and doggedly traditional technique. Why would a painter like this be seen as modern? Adams ventures that it’s because his likenesses “reverse the usual purposes of portraiture and figural painting. Rather than affirming the self-worth and social station of his sitters, his paintings seem to undercut such certainties,” and that “Eakins’ anxiety about the body and gender roles seems to foreshadow a major tendency in both contemporary art and art criticism.” Eakins is thus modern because his works embody his psychic challenges. He brought his subjects into his own Freudian theater, and used his paintings to work out the resolutions he needed, over and over again.
So Adams contends that Goodrich, the man who laid the groundwork for American art history, profoundly distorted his account of Eakins’ life, choosing, instead of the disturbing, moving truth, a triumphal story that glossed over the obvious strangeness in Eakins’ work and that erased the madness in Eakins’ family and himself. Instead of the specificity of Eakins’ real struggle, Goodrich told a generic “bohemian story”. This should make us skeptical of his treatments of other American artists of the era—which have been very influential.
Goodrich also wrote the biography of Winslow Homer, and along with his protégé William Innes Homer, Goodrich did the first biography of Ryder, also a man of some sexual oddity and an artist of power not easily explained. Have these artists’ lives too been bowdlerized by a simplifying impulse to find greatness in American art in a palatable form? This form would enable a closer analogy between American modernism and European modernism; it would normalize it and bring it into proximity with the canon of greatness that existed at the time. After all, some PR maybe seemed necessary—if you read Sadakichi Hartmann’s two-volume History of American Art, published in 1902, you find a long litany of the really not great, hundreds of artists without distinction: it’s only Ryder, Eakins, and Homer who are notable; Hartmann says as much. Most are doomed to oblivion by attempts to please either a mercantile culture of shallow tastes or a derivative academy who looked only to Europe.
Would this be harmful if it was the case, this bowdlerizing of artists’ lives to give them more curb appeal? Maybe not at the time. But now, as we flounder in the last shallows of modernism, so loath to leave it and uncertain of what may follow that “postmodern” is the best term we can come up with for the current period, it’s important to look carefully at modernism’s peculiar American genesis in its three virgin fathers.
Unlike art in Europe, which culminates in modernism after a long history, American art begins in modernism. There was no “American” art before it. Other American-born painters of the time were modern, but not “American”: Mary Cassatt, who studied with Gerome in Paris at the same time as Eakins, stayed in Paris; Whistler and Sargent used many of the ideas of European modernists in their works. Despite their passports, their work was European, and while they were certainly individually distinctive, they did not carve out new realms for painting. I find it interesting that the impetus to the new, in America, was not driven by any kind of “new ideas,” any conscious meditation on what a new art might be. It arose from something very different: from men whose damaged relation to their own bodies drove them to figure forth images that recreated the relationship between their bodies and perceptions and the physical world—that attempted, magically, to really re-make their world.
Interestingly, in a sidelight, the man whom the poet John Berryman called “our first modern writer,” Stephen Crane, was a contemporary of these painters. Like them, he had worked in journalism; like them, he was an American original, not tempered in Europe. Also like them, he was wounded in the body—sexually eccentric, though not celibate; tubercular. His work too is powerful for reasons that seem almost secret; they tend to remain veiled to most critical assessments. Stories like “Open Boat” and his slum fiction have a breathtaking fearless immediacy that seems filmic—or, in the terms of their day, magic. (Perhaps the role of all of these men is not to give virgin birth to American visual art, but to be the fathers of film.)
Conclusion
What does it mean that the era that has defined American art for all of its history (we have yet to leave the modernist paradigm behind, after all) found its roots not in aesthetic questions but in the struggles of wounded men to make themselves whole, to recreate the world, over and over, in such a way that they would be allowed to live? That American art originated in, was defined by, not the impulse merely to represent the world differently but, through the force of different kinds of powerful realisms, to make the world over into the likeness of one’s own compulsion, to relive crucial aspects of it until it could come right? There’s something about that strain that survives in the strange powers of the tradition. Coming to know it clearly could allow us to move into a new era, to understand what we need art to do, here and now.
Works Cited
John Berryman, Stephen Crane
Elizabeth Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder
Caffin, Charles, review (reference found in Broun, Ryder)
Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer
Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins
Lloyd Goodrich and William Innes Homer, Painter of Dreams: Albert Pinkham Ryder
Sadakichi Hartmann, History of American Art
Peter Schjeldahl, “Winslow Homer,” New Yorker, Aug 8, 2005
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