KAREN WILKIN
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evidence that for a while Eakins used projected photographic images,
ingeniously combined, to reduce the labor of preparatory drawing.
Yet what is arresting about Eakins's pictures is not their verisimili–
tude, but their painterliness and physicality. Instead of the sleek, gener–
alized finish of his teachers' efforts, Eakins gives us a range of
surfaces-dry, brushy, smooth, delicate, smudged-celebrating the par–
ticularities of aging skin, the ruching of an elegant dress, the straining
muscles of an athlete, or the folds of a woolen coat. From his luminous
early paintings of rowers on the Schuykill to the searching, no-holds–
barred portraits of his last years, Eakins makes us equally aware of the
twin realities of what has been seen and the paint itself. He is perhaps
the American Courbet, dedicated, like his French avatar, to honestly ren–
dering the appearances and evoking the tactile reality of everyday expe–
rience, without disguising the materiality of his means. The tension
between a variety of robust paint applications and brilliant but unpre–
tentious illusionism is, in fact, part of the strength of his pictures.
That tension energizes the exhibition's star inclusions, the two great
group portraits in the tradition of Rembrandt's anatomies,
The Gross
Clinic
(1875,
Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia) and
The
Agnew Clinic
(1889,
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia). The
forthrightness of these familiar images still shocks. In
The Gross Clinic,
Eakins gives new meaning to the phrase "operating theater," creating
high drama out of the contrast between the gory exactitude of a crisply
rendered operation in progress and an incisive, introspective portrait of
Dr. Gross, his hand delicately holding a scalpel, his stern features both
illuminated and blurred by a wash of light. Light is, in fact, the protag–
onist of the picture, revealing every detail of Dr. Gross's bloodstained
fingers, an assistant's thinning hair, the patient'S bony buttocks and
sock-clad feet, and more, all rendered against a dim background of
watchful students. The picture reminds us of how much Eakins learned
from Velazquez when he studied his work in Spain. Despite the obvious
differences in subject,
The Gross Clinic
pays oblique homage to
Las
Meninas,
a connection made explicit by the weight of darkened, event–
filled space above Dr. Gross and his colleagues, and by the background
figures entering the theater, one lifting his arm, like the courtier on
Velazquez's stair.
As I said, the Eakins retrospective should not be missed. Those who
didn't get
to
Philadelphia can see it at the Metropolitan in the summer
of
2002.
In between, the show is at the Musee d'Orsay.
It
will be inter–
esting
to
see what the French make of this French-trained, gritty,
uncompromisingly truthful, single-minded American.
