RAYMOND CARNEY
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Eakins's or Crane's work -like his lengthy attention to the legibility
of both artists' handwriting- Fried neglects the less dramatic but
more engaging realistic narrative interests that make their texts mat–
ter so much to us. In short, if all that Eakins's and Crane's work tells
us is what Fried says they do , just as if all they tell us is what Johns
and Goodrich say they do , they truly don't deserve to have such at–
tention lavished on them.
The task set for American art criticism in the future will be to
find a way to be responsive to the practical, frequently prosaic, al–
ways realistic, human situations and concerns with which these
works obviously engage themselves, without being repressive of the
destabilizing imaginative and emotional energies also present in the
same works. What one searches for is, in effect, a third position as an
alternative to the two I have described - one not captive to the
psychological and social normativeness and narrative neutraliza–
tions of realism , and yet, one not willfully reading into the work
hermetic formal references or eccentric violences of expression.
The art of both Eakins and Crane pits commitments to nar–
rat ive realism and social forms of expression against transcendental
impulses that are essentially critical of all social arrangements and
realistic expressions. That is the vexed, double agenda of the great–
est works of nineteenth-century American art. An adequate criticism
would not reject or ignore the normative, social forms of expression
in these works , but itself do what Eakins's and Crane's work daringly
does: acknowledge the centrality of realistic forms of expression,
even as it simultaneously offers a radical critique of their limitations.
