Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist
by Henry Adams
Oxford Univ. Press. 583 pages, $40.
IN 1890, Weda Cook, a 23-year-old singer, posed for the Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. Cook later reflected that the painter had inspired in her “love and fear.” The same emotions haunted Eakins. Eakins Revealed, easily the most provocative book ever written about Thomas Eakins, shows how thoroughly love and fear of the body shaped Eakins’ work.
No other American artist has been more familiar with the human body. The young Eakins enrolled in anatomy and dissection classes to master the human form; his early works depict with piercing precision the bodies of boxers, rowers, and surgeons. After 1880, he bega
n photographing bodies, including, quite memorably, his own. Whether these are depictions of love or fear has always remained an open question. For generations, art historians interpreted Eakins’ life as a battle against Victorian America’s fear of the body. “I see no impropriety in looking at the most beautiful of Nature’s works, the naked figure,” Eakins insisted in a letter to his supervisor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts during a controversy that would end with Eakins’ resignation. More recently, scholars have grappled with the enigma of Eakins’ sexual desires. Some, after poring over the images of men in works like The Swimming Hole (1884–85), have confidently outed the artist; others have suggested that the iconoclastic Eakins helped articulate a grammar for the modern language of homoerotic desire, even if he didn’t speak that tongue himself. Both views assume that Eakins fought to free art from its fear of the body.
Eakins Revealed paints a very different portrait, one that’s all fear and no love. Author Henry Adams reports that Eakins molested his niece, drove one of his students to madness, and tormented female students with his propensity to exhibitionism. Alleging seduction, sodomy, incest, and bestiality, his diagnosis of Eakins includes scopophilia, castration anxiety, and even compulsive milk-drinking (because the painter “felt deprived of maternal affection”). And yet, Eakins Revealed seems to paint a fuller portrait of its author than of its subject. Adams assures us that he didn’t set out to write a “revisionist” study. In fact, he set his sights on nothing less than a character assassination, seizing upon shreds of evidence, combining hearsay with eccentric (if not downright perverse) readings of Eakins’ paintings, and adding ad hominem attacks on fellow art historians. Adams also throws in odd personal asides, as when he mentions that while touring Eakins’ home, he “had the sensation that dark and unpleasant things had happened there.”
But for all the book’s weaknesses—and its reception by professional art historians has been frosty—it does contain a few kernels of truth. Eakins was probably not quite the monster that Adams depicts, but he was undeniably cruel to his wife, aggressive and predatory toward female students, and less interested in freeing art students to observe naked bodies than he was desperate to look at them himself. Eakins emerges as both more troubled and more complex than previous studies have depicted him.
He also seems less gay. The images of men in his works, the paeans to the male body in his letters, and the anecdotes of escapades with male art students—all pale in comparison to his obsession with women. His paintings are not the homoerotic pleasure images that John Singer Sargent kept in a private sketchbook or the “physical culture” photos that Marsden Hartley would stash in a box in his studio some years later. And compared to the bathhouse patrons of the emergent gay subculture that Charles Demuth recorded in the 1910’s, the swimmers in Eakins seem almost (emphasis on almost) as innocent as Norman Rockwell’s skinny-dippers. Philadelphians certainly knew their local art teacher was sexually transgressive, but in the 1880’s—before the codification of homosexuality in medical and psychiatric literature, before the social transformations that made gay lives possible, before the trials of Oscar Wilde gave a face to the love that dared not speak its name—most of Eakins’ viewers lacked the conceptual tools to read his images in the ways we do now. Struggling to define something he called “adhesiveness,” even Walt Whitman never quite connected the dots.
Although younger by a generation, Eakins befriended Whitman during the poet’s last years in nearby Camden, New Jersey, and completed a wondrously sympathetic portrait in 1888. Over the years, scholars have turned the two men into kindred spirits engaged in a joint effort at male camaraderie and homoerotic liberation of the body. “If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred,” Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass. But Whitman’s temple was Eakins’ prison. His pictures show how bodies haunt and torture even as they give pleasure; they bear pain and scars. Indeed, only by leaving love and fear of the body hopelessly entangled did Eakins unlock his artistic insight that psychological intensity takes a physical form: anxiety tenses muscles; tears wet the eyes. Perhaps this is why the sitters in Eakins’ magical late portraits, all of whom are clothed, nonetheless seem so brutally and painfully naked.
