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Projecting an Image: The Contested Cultural Identity of Thomas Eakins - Exhibition Reviews
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 2002 by David Lubin
The most outstanding of the photography-derived paintings in the exhibition, Mending the Net (Fig. 4), can be identified as a work of realism only by using that term in a narrow and flat-footed way. As Roland Barthes pointed out more than thirty years ago, realism is a mode of representation no more nor less objective than any other; it is the style that goes to the greatest lengths to pretend not to be a style. Even a work as apparently neutral and unemotional as Mending the Net refuses to be understood as simply a snapshot of reality (or, in this case, an artful composite of snapshots).
Poetic and sacramental overtones fill this elegiac frieze of figures on a hillside. Seven adult men wearing hats and suspenders stand or kneel in various postures against the horizon line, green earth below and blue sky above, while they handle the fine filaments of a fish net that, metaphorically, binds them all together. Two small children take their place among them, while, far off to the side, a gentleman in black, wearing a dark hat, sits beneath an expansive, half-living, half-dead tree reading a newspaper or some other piece of writing. In the lower left portion of the canvas, a gaggle of geese moves about in Brownian motion. Seven geese stationed beneath seven men: Is some sort of religious significance to be discerned in the repetition of the holy number, or perhaps some sort of Aesopian fable, in which men are either likened to geese or contrasted with them?
The painting is cool, austere, and remote, like a Greek funeral stela, yet at the same time Romantic. The huge, solitary tree calls to mind the work of Caspar David Friedrich, as does the figure of the seated man who faces away from the viewer. I'm not source hunting here, simply trying to indicate that while Mending the Net may have been assembled from projected photographs, for all its "realistic" details it comes across primarily as a moody and allegorical evocation of a masculine work community positioned within the all-encompassing vault of nature. To draw on anachronistic movie references, Mending the Net belongs as much to the moral universe of John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seat (1956) as it does to local-color realism of the Gilded Age. Ford's film, showing workmen gathered harmoniously and heroically on the cusp of a Welsh hillside, arouses in the viewer a sense of sadness at the encroachments of industrialism, while Bergman's depicts a linked chain of hu manity pulled across the hillside horizon by the black-clad figure of Death. Eakins, too, etches figures of mankind in the middle distance on the crest of the earth and against the sky in a manner that bespeaks innocence, loss, and mortality.
Eakins's oeuvre possesses much more of a night side, a dark, gothic, pre-, post-, or anti-Enlightenment dimension, than the exhibition acknowledged either in its accompanying texts or in its steady march forward through his artistic chronology. Committed above all to illustrating in meticulous detail his academic and photographic manner of constructing images, the show treated him as an indisputable Great Artist whose greatness could be safely assumed. It therefore did not attempt to reassess his body of work for the Eakins faithful or transfigure it for agnostics who were looking for some way into the art, one that would make it resonate for them.
