Featured White Papers
- Oct. 14th: Simplified IT with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (ZDNet)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- The rise of Web commuting (Citrix Online)
Content provided in partnership with
Projecting an Image: The Contested Cultural Identity of Thomas Eakins - Exhibition Reviews
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2002 by David Lubin
Sewell authored the thin, elegant, 136-page 1982 catalogue on his own. For the hulking, 446-page, double-columned 2001 model, he brought together a team of eleven Eakins specialists (himself among them). The comparative difference in the size and weight of the catalogues is telling. In 1982, the new Eakins scholarship was only just revving up, having been inspired by three important publications of the late 1970s and one of the early 1980s: the Eakins catalogues from the Hirshhorn (1977) and Philadelphia (1978) museums, the special issue of Arts magazine (1979) devoted to Eakins, and the magisterial two-volume life of Eakins (1982) by Lloyd Goodrich, the dean of Eakins scholars, who had published his first book on the painter five decades earlier. (12)
In the two decades since the 1982 exhibition, Eakins scholarship, as mentioned, has burgeoned in numerous directions, deploying discourses of feminism, poststructuralism, and cultural history in a manner that has allowed his work to be examined in fresh new terms. Elizabeth Johns's 1983 book on Eakins and Michael Fried's 1985 essay on The Gross Clinic were two of the three most significant events in Eakins scholarship to follow on the heels of the 1982 exhibition. (13) The third was the amazing discovery in 1984 of the so-called Bregler Collection, a treasure trove of previously rumored but unexamined Eakins documents and photographs traced by Kathleen Foster, then curator of the Pennyslvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and her assistant, Elizabeth Milroy, in a run-down South Philadelphia townhouse.
Charles Bregler had been a student of Eakins and an acolyte. When the artist's widow, Susan Macdowell Eakins, died without heir in 1938, Bregler managed to salvage from her home stacks of correspondence, clippings, photograph albums, and glass-plate negatives that otherwise would have been committed to the rubbish heap. After Bregler's death twenty years later, at the age of ninety-three, they passed to his widow, a woman half a century younger than he, who stored them in an assortment of shopping bags and dress boxes in a bedroom of her mother's house, to which she subsequently moved, and where Foster and Milroy made her acquaintance and begun to discuss with her the future of this astounding repository of art historical materials. The Pennsylvania Academy acquired the collection in 1985 and began its inventory. In 1989 Foster and the academy archivist Cheryl Leibold published a guide to more than one thousand documents in the Bregler Collection. A follow-up guide to the 648 photographic images in the collec tion appeared in 1994. (14)
Beyond providing a wealth of useful information and documentation about the way Eakins taught, made art, and lived his life at various stages in his career, the Bregler Collection proved to contain materials of a racy, even incendiary nature. These materials, in fact, may be the reason why the reclusive Bregler was so cautious during his lifetime about making his collection available to the public. In one photograph, a nude Susan Eakins, her face scratched out by someone--probably either herself or Bregler, apparentiy in an effort to preserve her anonymity--leans against the artist's horse Billy in a woodland setting, one arm reaching toward the horse's mane, the other cast provocatively back behind her shoulder, giving her breasts an upward tilt. Many of the collection's photographs show attractive young art students posing nude individually or in pairs, even in small groups. No matter that many of these nude photographs can be correlated to identifiable painting or sculptural projects and were thus an obvio us extension of Eakins's dedication to life study as the basis for figurative art. They cannot be viewed today without raising all sorts of questions about intention, propriety, and 19th-century sexuality.
