Eakins and Icons - Thomas Eakins

Realism has been resurgent lately, thanks in part to the development of new media allegedly capable of reproducing a "virtual reality." The old notion of realism as pure, autonomous mimesis is alive and well in this fantasy. Eakins's commitment to a scientifically grounded realism may cast him as a grandfather to this development when the histories begin to be written. We can only hope that he will also help us see the outlines of virtual reality's own reality effects.

Realism and Modernism

A simplistic understanding of realism as intensified iconicity was implicit in the modernist critique of realist art as false and deceptive--an art of illusions portraying illusions. By refusing to be contained by that definition and by incorporating into a realist art semiotic experiments similar to those modernist artists were conducting, Eakins's work forces a rethinking of the realism versus modernism opposition. The argument of Eakins's painting is that a modern realism must find creative ways to overcome the limitations of vision, of appearances, and of mimesis as instruments for knowing and representing the world. All three kinds of limits--of the unaided eye to discern truthful information in the aspects of things, of the surfaces of the world to contain and display truth, of resemblance as a tool for representing knowledge and truth--were relentlessly tested in his paintings.

Abandoning mimesis could never have been the answer for Eakins; it would have meant giving up too much. The more or less plausible slices of the seen world he insistently deployed as skeletons for his paintings were essential to this researcher in "iconology." They put iconicity on the dissecting table and kept it there as the perpetual object of analysis and critique in his work. As Rowland had perfected the diffraction grating, and Muybridge instantaneous photography, so Eakins experimented with iconic representation in order to make it a finely machined tool for gathering, recording, and communicating precise information. Modernism's expressive distortion and abstraction represented abandonment of hope for mimesis as a foundation for a modern art, and Eakins was unwilling to follow this path as long as possibilities for enriching and extending iconicity remained untested. Taking mimesis beyond illusionism through scientific research and through judicious intermixing of diagrammatic and noniconic signs was Eakins's vision of the route to a modern art. It is easy to imagine that this could have seemed a course with considerable potential, but it lost momentum even in Eakins's own late work, and no brilliant followers took up the struggle.

Eakins's paintings confound our maps of late nineteenth-century American and European art in two significant ways. First, they disregard the terms of the period opposition between art and science. Caroline Jones and Peter Galison have described the shape of the binary economy of art and science at that moment: "the scientific method became linked inextricably with technology, industrial progress, and class mobility, while institutionalized art and literature came to be associated with the preservation of tradition, social order, and the conservation of rustic values." (72) They go on to point out that the modernist avant-garde defined itself in part through opposition to this binary structure by claiming for itself affiliation with science and technology. Eakins's involvement with science was certainly different from modernism's, particularly insofar as he employed it to extend the reality effects of academic realism. Nonetheless, it disrupted one of the fundamental oppositions through which academicism and m odernism were defining themselves.