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Thomas Eakins : The Absolute Male

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THOMAS EAKINS: THE ABSOLUTE MALE is a beautifully assembled volume of the photographs and paintings of America's premiere artist. The concept behind this very fine volume is to emphasize the importance of the strong-willed pioneer of figurative art in a time when the country was in the throws of Victorianism in art (have things changed in over a century?). In his short but fine essay John Esten simply outlines the chronology of Eakins career and then lets the works speak for themselves. Eakins trained both in America and in Paris, in the latter with the artist Gerome who insisted on classical perfection in his depictions of the human figure. This attitude rankled Eakins who believed that anything less than the observed representation of the body made it ugly. "I see no impropriety in looking at the most beautiful of Nature's works, the naked figure." And with that he absorbed all the good in the classes in Paris (which included the first use of photography in providing reference for drawing and painting) and returned to America where he resumed his sportsman activities, all the while using his observing eye to reclaim the beauty of the human form in action. His photographs are now considered some of the finest wroks of their kind. He worked with the famous Muybridge, adopting his technique of serial photography to study the nude male form. When he returned to teaching at the Philadelphia Academy he insisted on allowing fully nude models to pose for the students. His defiance of the mores of the day in requiring that the women students be given equality in this aspect of his Life Studies courses resulted in his dismissal as a teacher, but added to his importance as a mentor.

This excellent book includes Eakins many photographs of the nude male, posed and at play and sport. Where applicable the photograph used as a reference is displayed adjacent to the subsequent canvas. Here is the most singularly bold and creative presentation to the age-old, cloaked secret that artists should not use photographs as reference if they say they 'draw only from the figure'. If ever there existed an homage to the marriage of the photograph with painting it is here. This is a very fine book, worth placing in all libraries both private and public.

Unless you have more money than you know what to do with or you must have every book on Eakins do not waste you time on this book. It is supposed to be a survey of Eakins drawing, painting and photography of the male nude. There are three so called drawings, two white forms that are supposed to be knees, a scribbled thumbnail sketch for a painting that is not reproduced and one small drawing of a figure. There are only a few paintings, most of which we have seen reproduced better elsewhere. Most of the blurry photographs are not even identifies as by Eakins; in fact some include him in them so could not have been taken by him (although they may have been set up by him?).
What a wasted opportunity to do a comprehensive survey of a great artist's work; an opportunity to compare the three media and how he used the photos and drawings to develop the major works. Even a good survey of the drawings and paintings would have been more interesting and useful.

Thomas Eakins was a firm believer in the importance of the male nude as a subject for drawing, and encouraged his students by insisting that they no only draw from the male nude but spend recreation together in the nude, and this book clearly demonstrates that he practised this.

The text is relatively brief, what follows is a collection of about 50 images including Eakins' paintings but predominately his photographs of the posing male nudes that he he had his students draw, along with photographs he took of his naked students engaged in activities such as swimming.

With ten full-colour plates of paintings, and most of the sepia photographs also reproduced in full-colour the beauty of this book is in its illustrations. It is well produced with most of the images full-page in size, and often sensible presented against a neutral background as opposed to the stark white page. The book includes a chronology, bibliography, notes to the text and an index.

This is a beautifully produced little volume of Eakins's photographs and paintings of nude males (the phrase "absolute male" is a journalistic euphemism for male art class models stripped of their posing straps). The text is thin and doesn't really say anthing new. The paintings are also likely to be familiar to anyone who has studied Eakins and have been frequently reproduced in more comprehensive catalogs. Even the photographs, called "Naked Series" because they show a single nude model from multiple angles, have been reproduced previously. Dating from the 1880s these may interest the student of early photography. While author John Esten seems to consider these to be works of art in their own right, they clearly served primarily as reference material for Eakins. This is most obvious in the swimming pictures and in one painting called "The Wrestlers" which--muscle for muscle, sinew for sinew--is based on a photograph he took of fellow art students in Paris in 1899 (pages 68 and 69).

The book includes a 2-page chronology of Eakins's life and a bibliography. The latter is a very short list; it only cites 19 works, two of which are books of poetry (Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" makes sense, but I fail to see the relevance of "The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake".) Very relevant but not cited is Helen Cooper's excellent 1996 book "Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures" (ISBN 0-300-06939-1). If your primary interest is a book of beautifully reproduced images, these shortcomings will not bother you.