Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist [Hardcover]

Henry Adams (Author), Thomas Eakins (Artist) (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0641749953 | ISBN-13: 978-0641749957

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For generations, Thomas Eakins--whose famous paintings include "The Gross Clinic" and "The Champion Single Sculls"--has been regarded as a 19th-century American hero. In Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist, art historian Henry Adams offers a radically different view that allows us to better understand "the intensity and emotional desperation of Eakins' art." Eakins' brush with scandal--he was dismissed from his teaching post at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1886 for removing the loincloth from a male model posing for a class of women students--is generally described by admiring art historians as a brave attempt to modernize stuffy old rules. Adams reveals that the artist was a life-long exhibitionist who appears to have preyed on vulnerable young women. Drawing on the Bregler papers, a cache of revealing documents from Eakins' studio that surfaced in the mid-1980s, Adams describes a man whose sense of masculine identity was thwarted by a deep identification with his mentally ill mother and an inability to please his father. Reviewing the major Eakins studies, beginning with the landmark monograph by Lloyd Goodrich, Adams finds that many aspects of the artist's life were suppressed to establish him as an all-American hero.

Adams presents his case with the mesmerizing power of a star attorney-at-law, painting a detailed picture of the artist's troubled personal life before launching into correspondences between the life and the art. Although readers may question some of Adams' interpretations--whether of Freudian theory or the emotional effect of a specific painting--the author's direct, probing style makes Eakins Revealed as riveting as a courtroom drama. In his concluding arguments, Adams proposes that the subjects of Eakins' late portraits, almost uniformly pensive and hollow-eyed, are in fact multiple versions of the brooding artist himself. Ultimately, the author's new assessments endow Eakins' work with an anxiety about the body and gender roles--issues that preoccupy many artists of our own time. Readers new to Eakins may be disappointed to find only small, black-and-white reproductions of the works in this book, and a few of the works discussed (such as "Crucifixion") are not illustrated at all. But skeptical specialists will be pleased to see that Adams includes copious (and often fascinating) notes and a full bibliography. —-Cathy Curtis

From Publishers Weekly

Don't let the lurid title and subtitle fool you: this is an academic study, full of pedantic asides, boring psychologizing (in which figures in many paintings are mapped onto figures from Eakins's family) and interminable stretches of interpretation of often too-small reproductions (330 b&w in all). But Eakins (1844–1916) is undoubtedly a painter of major interest, and Adams, a formidable art historian who collaborated with Ken Burns on a Thomas Hart Benton documentary for PBS, does have a fresh take that he works out with rigor and care. He links evidence for sexual trauma in Eakins's childhood to evidence of subsequent episodes of violence and sexual misconduct in a manner that is neither prurient nor moralizing. And he displays great affinity for, and astute observations of, the work itself, which includes some of the most striking American paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An entire chapter dedicated to Eakins's ultrarealist operating room depiction The Gross Clinic (1875) proves illuminating all the way through. A reconsideration of the photographs that Eakins both exhibited and worked from contemplates a variety of kinds of nudity, including the "homosocial or homosexual" qualities of some of them. After a chapter on "Inflicting Pain," the book ends with a wrap on Eakins's life and reputation as constructed in the literature, which lingers, in its final pages, on the painter's "pleasure in nakedness."
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 583 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0641749953
• ISBN-13: 978-0641749957
• ASIN: 0195156684
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,074,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Reading, But Does Biography Inform Art?, August 16, 2005

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (Hardcover)

There is no question that Henry Adams scholarly book EAKINS REVEALED: THE SECRET LIFE OF AN AMERICAN ARTIST is an important tome in the already extensive library of the life and works of Thomas Eakins, an artist still considered by many to be the greatest American artist who ever lived. And if many Eakins' devotees find this information as gathered and regaled by Adams as an attempt to push Eakins of his historic pedestal, then I think the chosen title for this treatise has been misleading.

Adams has poured over countless reams of notes and letters and documents and oral histories (all well documented and scrutinized in his extensive bibliography) and presents another aspect of Eakins' life - that of a crude, exhibitionist, sexually ambiguous vs disturbed, depressed man obsessed with nudity and body functions and a man whose family history of cruelty, incest and madness informed his paintings.

The book is divided into three sections: Part One - The Eakins Legacy (including Eakins family background, odd living conditions, family quarrels, the deaths and insanities of those close to him, and including the infamous Loin Cloth Scandal that contributed to his being fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Part Two - Life and Art in which the previous information is shown to have influenced Eakins' portraits, rowing paintings, swimming paintings and the BIG paintings like 'The Gross Clinic', 'The Champion Single Sculls', 'William Rush' etc; and Part Three - The Case of Thomas Eakins in which Adams pulls it all together maintaining that indeed because of Adams' scholarship, Eakins is still the most important painter America has produced.

The question arises as to just how much of this Freudian muck raking is necessary and whether ultimately how important is this 'new' information to the viewer of Eakins' paintings. Yes, facts such as those presented (ad infinitum!) in this lengthy volume provide smarmy interest, if not material for a movie about a strange but great man. Others have written similarly about Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Artemsia Gentileschi, Bacon, Warhol, de Kooning, Pollock etc. No artist can stand before an easel and not have his/her interior feelings and experiences influence the painted work. But does all of this innuendo-plucking make or break an artist's place in history?

The argument Adams makes is ultimately strong and deserves respect: "Eakins, far from being the most moral of American artists, was surely one of the most profoundly confused, even disturbed. By making art out of the chaos, conflict, and scandal of his own life, Eakins brought us more deeply into the world of sorrow, suffering, and despair than any other American artist of the nineteenth century. By some peculiar alchemy, he made his dark feelings beautiful, as anyone can attest who has contemplated one of his major paintings. Their effect can only be described as hypnotic".

Where Adams succeeds in making his points is in his painting by painting dissection of all of the Freudian implications of composition, exhibitionism, indeterminate gender buttocks, hidden models, etc, yet his visual examples are so poorly presented in this volume that they are all but indecipherable. Would that the publishers had devoted more space to the paintings and even used color, an important component of Eakins' works, to make the lesson more workable.

Yet as in Adams summary, Thomas Eakins is such an important painter that any additional information or perspective only results in expanding our appreciation for his greatness. Adams writes well (if excessively) and if the reader can drop preconceived prejudice that Adams is out to dethrone Eakins by prying into his psyche, this is actually a fine read. And given some time for reactionary responses to die down, EAKINS REVEALED will be an important contribution to the art libraries. Grady Harp, August 05

36 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Twisted Freudian Interpretation of An American Icon, April 17, 2005

By 

Alexander Boyette (Vienna, Va.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (Hardcover)

If a reader were to believe the many ludicrous claims that Adams makes about Thomas Eakins, one would think that the artist was homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and a pedophile, exhibitionist, voyeur, sadist, and masochist; and further, that he practiced incest and bestiality (all of which, Adams suggests, was driven by a desire to posses his own mother). Take your pick! Adams covers all the bases. Eakins is not so much "revealed" in this book as he is "concealed." He seems to ignore altogether, what to my mind, are the most fascinating things about this remarkable man: that he studied logarithms for fun, that science, not art, was his first love, that he was conversant in five languages, and that he found beauty where others saw ugliness. Among the more humorous assertions that Adams makes about Eakins is that the artist painted while sitting on the floor (he used an easel), that he shot his sister's cat for fun (Adams conveniently leaves out the fact that Eakins' father ordered him to do so because the animal was rabid), and that he painted clergymen because they wore dresses, which supposedly reminded Eakins of outfits his dead mother wore. After reading this dreadful book I came to actually like it as a study of how inbred (dare I say incestuous?) that some members of our academic community have become. Even if you are convinced, or want to believe that Abraham Lincoln was homosexual, you will still have difficulty making the creative leaps necessary to take this book seriously.

12 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb, June 4, 2005

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John Michael Albert "John-Michael Albert" (Portsmouth NH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (Hardcover)

Like most people who recognize the name, I came to Eakins first through "The Swimmers," an amazingly perfect painting. Later, I saw similar qualities in the rowing paintings, and realized that he was not a one hit wonder. Since then, my personal discovery of more paintings and the photographys have double underscored the mastery and the mystery I detected in each work. Reading about him, however, has been of little help. It seemed that articles were all over the place, each selecting a very particular array of facts from his wildly varied life and ignoring the facts of the other. Confusing, to say the least. This book, thankfully, pulls it all together for me. It's in three sections: the first summarizes writing about Eakins to date; the second goes through his life and works chronologically; and the third (like any good scholarly work) expostulates the authors own synthesis of the available data. Perhaps most distracting to potential readers may be the heavy reliance on Freudian psychology as an interpretive tool, a tool absolutely essential to a life so full of artifacts and so nearly devoid of primary-source, prose interpretation of their significance. If you either don't buy Freud or find it difficult to 'willing suspend your disbelief' for the sake of argument, this book will be a big zero for you. On the other hand, I am so grateful to have such a rich resource that draws together the obvious mastery of Eakins with the shadowy mystery of his life that I've intuited but been unable to name before now. As with most of the great questions about the origins of art, there are no concrete answers; too much is unknown, we have to assume too much from scattered iconographic hints. But this is a damned good exposition of both the questions, as they pertain to Eakins life, and possible answers that leave me more enthusiastic about Eakins's art, and more inspired by his craft than before.