In Love with the Specific

By ROBERT HUGHES

Philadelphia celebrates its realist genius, Thomas Eakins

A As from this week, through Aug. 1, anyone interested in realist painting must go to Philadelphia. American artists who call themselves realists should, if necessary, be dragged there by the collar; the experience waiting for them will be salutary and humbling. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is having a commemorative show of Thomas Eakins. It marks no particular date of his own. Eakins was born in 1844, and he died in 1916. But he passed his whole life, except for four years of European study, in Philadelphia, and his genius--hardly too strong a word, this time--is a proper thing to celebrate in that city's 300th anniversary year.

Eakins is the greatest realist painter America has so far produced. He never successfully idealized a subject. When theatrical, which he rarely was, he tended to look silly. He was pragmatic, cussed, inquisitive, thoroughgoing, relentlessly observant, and plain of pictorial speech: a Yankee to the last finger bone. He was so in love with the specific that one scholar managed to compute, from the sun's angle, the time and date of the scene depicted in one of his paintings of rowers training on the Schuylkill, The Pair-Oared Shell; they went under the bridge, give or take a few seconds, at 7:20 p.m. on either May 28 or July 27, 1872.

In order to fix the facts he loved--the blurred motion of a spoked wheel, the tilt of a catboat beating to windward, the awkward play of a naked boy's legs as he dives--Eakins produced a mass of preparatory work, in many mediums. Convinced that the camera was truth, he took photographs and worked from them; he was one of the first American artists to do so. He made drawing after drawing, from mere thumbnail sketches to stupendously elaborate perspective studies that include notes on such minutiae as eight cross sections of an oar from loom to blade, or the reflection of a distant bush in a ripple of water. To get the muscles of horse and man right, he modeled them in wax.

All this output cannot go in one show; it would have been burdensome to even the most dedicated Eakins student. Instead, the exhibition's curator, Art Historian Barrel Sewell, has intelligently chosen some 150 paintings, studies and photographs to provide a thematic, rather than a chronological approach. There are certain broad categories of imagery in Eakins. There are the rowing and sporting and sailing scenes. There are the paintings of medical and scientific inquiry. There are the horse pictures, the portraits, and so on. By sampling each of these, Sewell hoped to build up a convincing picture of Eakins' main preoccupations, and of the growth of his style.

Eakins was no theorist, but he was by no means a bluff simpleton of the brush either. Right from the start, he had a clear idea of what he wanted painting to do. It was an idea that came out of his own experience and appetites and was enlarged by his contact with French realism as practiced by his teacher, Jean-Leon Gerome. As a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he had disliked drawing from the plaster casts of antique statues. He was not interested in ideal beauty. Significantly, one of his earliest surviving drawings is of a mechanical lathe. Such things had no pre-existing "aura"; they were not "artistic"; you either drew them right, or drew them wrong. "In a big picture," Eakins wrote to his father from Paris, "you can see what o'clock it is, afternoon or morning, if it's hot or cold, winter or summer, and what kind of people are there, and what they are doing and why they are doing it."

But realism was not restricted to such facts. "The sentiments," Eakins added, "run beyond words. If a man makes a hot day he makes it like a hot day he once saw or is seeing; if a sweet face, a face he once saw or which he imagines from old memories or parts of memories and his knowledge, and he combines and combines ..." Such was the essence of the realist enterprise. The act of painting negotiates an agreement between what we see and what we know--between memory and impulse, between the brush's gesture and the million other gestures that constitute the history of painting.

Eakins would never have echoed Christopher Isherwood's mendacious claim: "I am a camera." He was not passive. He painted what he saw--but he chose what to see. He had predilections about life, although to call him a moralist--a title many realist painters welcomed--is to invite misunderstanding. There are no Eakins paintings of wistful peasant goose girls, `a la Gerome. He was not a diagnostician or a social protester; not, like Edouard Manet, a dissecting dandy. But he did stubbornly cling to two social themes, linked in the familiar Victorian cliche, Mens sana in corpore sano. On one hand, the healthy body, absorbed, stringy and competent, straining at the oars or alert at bat or displaying itself, as an un-ideal figure in an American Arcadia, naked by a waterhole. On the other, the heroic mind, exemplified for Eakins in the forward stretch of scientific inquiry and summed up in the paternal figure of the Didactic Doctor.

Such was the theme of his two most ambitious paintings, which the Philadelphia show brings together in one room for the first time--The Gross Clinic, which Eakins, a mere 30 years old, painted in 1875, and The Agnew Clinic, done in a much higher and more even key 14 years later. In one obvious sense, The Gross Clinic was a homage to Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp. It also contains traces of other grand manners, such as Velasquez, the hero of tonal painting in the Paris ateliers of the 1870s: the shadowy figure silhouetted in the amphitheater entrance, hardly visible in reproduction, seems to be a quote from Las Meninnas, which Eakins had studied in the Prado.

It was an almost obsessive project, a "masterpiece" from the word go. Eakins did so many studies for it that Gross wished him dead, but they paid off. The head of Dr. Gross, thought and tension made flesh, is one of the supreme 19th century portraits, and the drama of contrast between the dense masses of black suits and gloomy tiers of students, and the swooning white of the patient's thigh surrounded by anxious straining hands and white cloth, reaches its apex in the fresh blood on Gross's hand and the retracted lips of the wound. Such imagery alarmed Philadelphian taste a century ago; The Agnew Clinic was rejected from the Pennsylvania Academy's exhibition in 1891 because it depicted a mastectomy for cancer and was "not cheerful for ladies to look at," an understatement of the first order.

In his time Eakins was reproached for being too scientific, not artistic enough, though "a builder on the bedrock of sincerity, and an all-sacrificing seeker after the truth." Their freedom from "poetic" conventions is, of course, just what makes his best paintings so moving to a modern eye. In them, system and nature rise to a peculiarly close relationship. "The big artist," Eakins wrote, "keeps a sharp eye on Nature and steals her tools . .. Then he's got a canoe of his own, smaller than Nature's, but big enough for every purpose ... With this canoe he can sail parallel to Nature's sailing." To spend time along the wall in the Philadelphia Museum where Eakins' major paintings and drawings of rowers and shells are hung is, eventually, to see what he meant. The perspective setups have the gratuitous complexity of Uccello and the modernity of Sol LeWitt; their geometrical, measured web of lines turns, slowly and inevitably, into the observed structure of water surfaces, the arrowing interpenetrations of ripples, the striations, and the delicate punctuation of water droplets in light. "There is so much beauty in reflections," Eakins wrote, "that it is generally well worth while to try to get them right," and so he did, at the price of disciplined and laborious observation.

To construct was to see. He was never interested in conventional beauty. Sober, pinched, reflective, lined and melancholy, his portraits remind us of that. But how many American artists said more about the sense of being in the world? Eakins was that extreme rarity, an artist who refused to tell a lie even in the service of his own imagination. --By Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.