Thomas Eakins’s Pursuits
by Kelly Presutti | 17 October 2010 | Museums
LACMA’s Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins exhibition is closing tomorrow, the first organized exhibition of his work in the city since 1927. With the recent restoration of The Gross Clinic at the PMA, the man often referred to as “the greatest of all American figure painters” has made a showing on both coasts this year, though Manly Pursuits presents a more complex Eakins than the familiar realist of Philadelphia.
An extensive selection of original photographs and reprints by Eakins and his students (many printed expressly for this exhibition, in the case of originals too fragile to display) make up a large portion of the presentation. Delving into Eakins’s process, the solidity of his figures becomes increasingly apparent, each body excessively studied and articulate in contrast to its photographic inspiration. The process and evolution of the artist is most remarkably displayed in the depictions of wrestlers. In the two painted studies and a series of photographs of young men in various poses, Eakins seems to have spent a significant amount of time exploring the possibilities for bodies to intertwine, searching for an adequate arrangement. The final Wrestlers, a 2007 acquisition and the incentive for the show, gives the viewer a model of taut stability distilled out of motion, a perfect knot of locked bodies, positioned marvelously in the lower foreground of the painting. It is loosely based on one of the photographs, but Eakins willfully departs from it, making the figures more compact, the angles of their bodies more jarring. Eakins’s paint, notably, becomes sharper the greater the strain of his figures’ bodies, either surrendering his brushwork to the wrestlers’ bulging muscles or visibly asserting it across the loose pantsuit of their coach.
LACMA simultaneously presented an installation by Los Angeles artist Tad Beck based directly on Eakins’s photographs, and an adjacent exhibition of Catherine Opie’s work including her football landscapes, attempting to generate a dialogue grounded in subject matter. It’s a nice example of an institution thinking broadly and working across departments. In lieu of a catalogue, an e-book will be published later this year. The scholarly compilation of primary sources, contemporary criticism, and art historical pieces on Eakins’s sporting scenes is intended to compliment publications from the Amon Carter on swimming and Yale on rowing. The e-book, available for preview on i-Pads in the gallery, marks a step towards online publishing that is becoming increasingly frequent. In the meantime, aside from the two excellent volumes already mentioned, recent scholarship includes Henry Adams’s Eakins Revealed (2005), in which, using a structure Adams calls closer to that of a novel, he explores Eakins’s “profoundly tragic vision.” That vision seems more pressing after viewing this show, seeing the persistent photographic exploration of the body in motion countered by an ever-increasing heaviness in his figures, collapsing, eventually, to the ground.
Thomas Eakins, Wrestlers, 1899
