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Thomas Eakins, America's Spurned Master
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12683 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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12 / 1994 |
2,227 Words |
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Andrew Ferren
Andrew Ferren is senior press officer at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and a freelance writer based in New York. |
When Thomas Eakins died in 1916, fewer than a dozen of his works were in museums. His paintings had been included in major exhibitions only sporadically and sold even less frequently. Often the artist's friends and relatives who posed for his intensely probing, psychological portraits wouldn't even accept the pictures as gifts. Upon Eakins' death, most of those portraits, along with the bulk of his output of forty years, were bequeathed to his widow, the staunchest champion of her husband's art.
Today nearly every work from that bequest hangs in museums in the United States and abroad, in several cases adding significant strength to already august institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan. Eakins is now considered among the greatest of American artists, extolled for the better part of this century as a heroic figure who consistently flouted the conventions and prudery of his era and doggedly pursued his own singular artistic aim. The price he paid for his independent vision was marginalization, of both the artist and his art, for virtually his entire career.
This year is the sesquicentennial of Eakins' birth. One might think that the artist is again suffering from marginalization, for no major touring exhibition has been mounted in his honor. However, the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized an exhaustive retrospective only twelve years ago, and scholarship has not yet accumulated enough new material to make another big show worthwhile. And the 150th anniversary has not passed unnoticed. During the summer the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., showed about fifteen Eakins works from its collection. In September, the Smithsonian Institution published Eakins and the Photograph, a catalog of over twelve hundred
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