Was Eakins gay--or just a real troublemaker?

July 31, 2002|By Mary Panzer. Special to the Tribune. Mary Panzer is former curator of photography at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the author of "Mathew Brady and the Image of History."

NEW YORK — Art museums make my father uneasy. He walks through like a visitor in a country where he can't speak the language, grateful just to see a picture of something he can recognize. But most of the time, he can't understand what the fuss is about. He patiently reads the explanatory text and then starts asking questions, questions that I haltingly try to answer. By the time we leave the museum, one of us is usually mad.

To some artists, such a reaction is like oxygen. They just like to make you angry. At this summer's exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can see how Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins infuriated people throughout his career, from his first painted masterpiece, in 1876, until he died in 1916.

But after a while, you start to wonder whether Eakins' perverse spirit was just camouflage for a more serious, subversive obsession. With sex. Or men.

Always ingenious, Eakins devised endless ways to put naked or nearly naked people in his pictures. He painted a brutally realistic crucifixion scene; a group of men naked at a swimming hole; a sculptor in his studio with a young female model (and chaperone); and classical figures in a meadow, with and without their togas. On two occasions he depicted patients stretched out under a surgeon's knife, and throughout his career he painted thinly clad male athletes in the heat of competition.

Eakins constantly strived to create convincing illusions, and long before it was fashionable, he used photographs to further his goal. He often succeeded too well. In 1876, Eakins portrayed world-famous surgeon Samuel Gross in the midst of an operation, and submitted the portrait for the art display at the United States Centennial Exhibition. But the judges saw simply a bloody document and sent the painting to a hall for medical instruments. Today many people consider "The Gross Clinic" the finest painting Eakins ever made.

About 10 years later, Eakins presented an idyllic scene of men swimming in the river for one of his most important patrons, but the patron politely sent it back, asking for a painting that he could donate to an art museum someday.

Now "The Swimming Hole" is one of Eakins' best known and most popular images. It is a horizontal canvas, smaller than your sofa is long, showing six naked men and a big red dog, swimming in a river on a sunny day. One of them appears to be Eakins himself.

Viewers must have always seen that it expressed great pleasure in male companionship. These days, when homosexuality is an open subject, the painting, and the photographs that show the same setting and subjects, appear to indicate Eakins' own sexual preference. Many call him one of the first gay artists in America.

I think he would be sorry to hear it.

I don't know whether Thomas Eakins was gay or not, but I'm sure he would be dismayed by all this acclaim. Because more than anything else, Eakins wanted his art to make people uncomfortable, even angry.

Looking for answers

As a teacher, Eakins demanded that his students draw and paint nude models, and he even asked the students to pose nude for one another. But that does not explain why he pulled the loin cloth off a male model to show a room full of female students the shape of a male torso. Or why he used his own body to illustrate the same point for other girls. It does explain why a public scandal flared, and why he got fired.

A few years after that, Eakins again made his students pose for photographs, though they were just the young sons and daughters of his brother-in-law, Will MacDowell. But why did he keep on making photographs after MacDowell asked him to quit? The incident caused a permanent break, and Eakins was banned from seeing the children, or visiting their family again.

These are just a few of many incidents in which Eakins' apparent devotion to principle outweighed his commitment to his students, his job, his patrons and even his family.

Troubling stories

There are other troubling stories. Eakins chose to make a portrait of Louis Kenton, the man who married his wife's sister and beat her so badly she left him. Eerily, the painting is one of his best. On another occasion, a student who posed for her portrait publicly claimed that Eakins had promised to leave his wife and marry her. (The portrait was not finished.) Another young female student died a suicide, though no one ever established a clear connection between the art lessons and her death wish.

Eventually, the American public came to accept realistic painting. Eakins was rehabilitated for history, and since the 1930s, he has been known as a modern rebel, ahead of his prudish time.

But his work continued to raise problems. There were all those nude photographs. Why did he do it? Many paintings of many subjects looked too photographic. Was he cheating somehow? There were portraits of women who looked intelligent and miserable. There were men who looked like objects of desire.

A soothing tolerance

At last, in our new century, we've grown so tolerant of ambiguity, and photography, that the uneasiness is gone. The photographs are no longer a cheat, they look charming, and we enjoy the matching game, searching out the pose he stole and put in a painting. His naked male friends are almost sweet, as they stand on the river bank, posing like Greek gods. We don't flinch when we discover that his wife Susan was content to play along, posing nude in the studio, and outdoors with his horse. We don't mind that Eakins posed nude himself, and we see plenty of him, front and back. The scandal makes good gossip, and all the tired women could so easily be our mothers, or our friends.

In fact, even my father likes the work of Thomas Eakins. He likes sports and medicine, and likes to see pictures of doctors at work. He likes portraits of people in 19th Century clothes.

But would this make Eakins happy? Much less gay? I don't think so.