Projecting an Image: The Contested Cultural Identity of Thomas Eakins - Exhibition Reviews

The first and last galleries, the smallest rooms, felt tight and confining. By the end of the show, the crowd of viewers had thinned, and the constriction of space suited the theme of the artist's autumnal last years. At the start, however, it created a distinct problem, for two reasons. First, visitors to a large exhibition always cluster at the beginning, so the arrangement of space should alleviate the inevitable initial crowding rather than add to it. Second, the dropped ceiling, drably painted walls, and low lighting of this gallery seemed oddly Out of keeping with the works displayed, predominantly of sports and play, failing to match their exuberance. The dimming of the lights was apparently mandated by the inclusion of a pair of delicate watercolor and wash perspective drawings, but this had the unfortunate effect of starting the tour of the artist's career on a glum note, when brightness and broad vistas were more biographically appropriate. As noted below, darkness did indeed intrude into Eakins's l ife in these otherwise sunny early years, yet the general tone of his life during this phase was upbeat and hopeful, and the opening gallery of the exhibition should have conveyed these feelings.

Even before reaching the subdued first room, the visitor had to maneuver past the Scylla of a bustling gift shop crammed full of rower refrigerator magnets and horse-and-carriage neckties and the Charybdis of a not fully enclosed video projection space, where booming-voiced museum curators and conservators, to the accompaniment of sentimental period music, held forth on their discovery of the master's photographic tracings and the importance of this discovery in appreciating his art. Fortunately, the intrusive sounds of both the didactic video and the Eakins emporium diminished greatly by the second ga1lery.

This second gallery also proved disappointing. It contained what is surely the most famous object Thomas Eakins ever made, The Gross Clinic (Fig. 1). In surveys of world art, this is the one American painting of the 19th century considered indispensable. Yet here it received a throwaway placement on a relatively short wall, flanked by two portraits minor in significance. Apparently the exhibition designers wished to underplay this obvious candidate for viewer veneration, even as the show as a whole downplayed the personality and life crises of the artist. That's certainly an intellectually justifiable position, but it is one that deprived viewers of the rewards offered by a prime axial view: first glimpsing the painting from afar, then experiencing the mounting excitement of approaching it in stages, its abstract masses of lights and darks cohering at last into a storm of vivid details flashing from the gloom.

Happily, the viewing itinerary improved after this. The dramatic sight line onto the majestic painting of 1880 The Crucifixion (Fig. 2) created by the tall, narrow archway between galleries two and three provided the high point of the show's mise-en-scene. Because Eakins has always been regarded as a scientific realist and hard-boiled empiricist with little use for religion until late in his career, when he befriended a small group of Jesuit clerics, the overtly religious imagery of this painting has usually been understood as merely a pretext for an artist wishing to indulge his fascination with the principles of human anatomy (or, from a queer studies perspective, his fascination with naked young male models). Being able to stand before The Gross Clinic in the second gallery and glance through the archway at The Crucifixion close by in the third made me think about these two ostensibly dissimilar works in a new way.