Consider what a lavender mosaic might be made of these tiles: The distant and private Eakins did not wed til 40, when he joined a former student, herself 33, in a childless marriage. Their union may have helped to defuse the scandal when the patron refused Eakins’s “Swimming hole,” a contemporized pastoral showing nude adolescent boys bathing under the dogpaddling artist’s gaze. Uncompromising in his pursuit of visual truth, he posed himself and his students for nude photos, and lost his teaching post for exposing female students to a nude male model. His major subjects read like a catalog of male porno fantasies: muscled, mustachioed, and scantily-clad men rowing, boxing, playing baseball, or sharing other hearty outdoor activities where the intimate contact looks almost as erotic as competitive; or a pair of Zapata-clone Spanish musicians hunched together “rehearsing.” He also snapped his student/model John Wallace and himself together in the nude, sometimes with classical pan-pipes, and photographed the ruggedly handsome cowboys at a dude ranch. In short, like many men of his era, Eakins’s emotional, intellectual, and professional life was deeply homosocial, with men of various ages sharing studios and collaborating on projects; one friend was Walt Whitman, who lived nearby and sat for photographic and oil portraits. And I don’t think it’s just my imagination (or personal preference) that his male subjects are much better looking than his women.
Given the alarm bells all this would set off in anyone sensitive to sex and gender, it is dumbfounding that the wall plaques say exactly nothing about male eros. And “The swimming hole” is not in this show, which allows the catalog to pass over it with the brief and painfully discreet remark that it summed up his belief in “the splendor of the human body, the presence of beauty in modern American life, and the pleasures of ... friendship in the spirit of Plato’s original Academy” (p. 100). That’s all I found about The Topic in an admittedly rapid check of the fat catalog (though a few relevant articles are in the bibliography).
Alas, genteel avoidance and intellectual dismissal are still alive and kicking us in the cultural groin.
Discourse aside, the images are worth a detour: the young men are hunks, and Whitman is adorable. Unfortunately, the exhibit will close before CAA convenes in Philly in February, but there’s plenty of Eakins on permanent display. The show travels to Paris in February and New York in June.
Jim Saslow
N.B. We hear that “Swimming” (as the Amon Carter now calls its painting more well known as “The swimming hole”) will be at the Met for its version of the Eakins show. (SC)