Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist

by Henry Adams

Thomas Eakins is widely considered one of the great American painters, an artist whose uncompromising realism helped move American art from the Victorian era into the modern age. He is also acclaimed as a paragon of integrity, one who stood up for his artistic beliefs even when they brought him personal and professional difficulty--as when he was fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art for removing a model's loincloth in a drawing class.
Yet beneath the surface of Eakins's pictures is a sense of brooding unease and latent violence--a discomfort voiced by one of his sitters who said his portrait "decapitated" her. In Eakins Revealed , art historian Henry Adams examines the dark side of Eakins's life and work, in a startling new biography that will change our understanding of this American icon. Based on close study of Eakins's work and new research in the Bregler papers, a major collection never fully mined by scholars, this volume shows Eakins was not merely uncompromising, but harsh and brutal both in his personal life and in his painting. Adams uncovers the bitter personal feuds and family tragedies surrounding Eakins--his mother died insane and his niece committed suicide amid allegations that Eakins had seduced her--and documents the artist's tendency toward psychological abuse and sexual harassment of those around him.
This provocative book not only unveils new facts about Eakins's life; more important, it makes sense, for the first time, of the enigmas of his work. Eakins Revealed promises to be a controversial biography that will attract readers inside and outside the art world, and fascinate anyone concerned with the mystery of artistic genius.

Genres: Biography, Art, Nonfiction

583 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Henry Adams is an art historian and professor of art history.

Reviews

[Rena Sherwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

It must suck to be an art critic. No one takes you seriously except for those very few people who take everything you do WAY too seriously. There must not be a single moment where you can relax. Even if you get a book published to rave reviews you just cannot escape that tunnel vision of being perfect. It must make you paranoid and pathetic.

Which is as charitable a review as I'm ever going to give to Henry Adams' Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist. Adams discovered that Eakins was not the martyred saint of American art that Adams had thought him to be.

Oh, tragedy.

Adams must then go on a personal crusade to smear not only Eakins' life but the lives of anyone who ever wrote about Eakins.

I hate to think how Adams would take discovering the truth about Santa Claus.

This is a book for art critics. Adams tosses around the last names of critics as if they were household names like "Madonna" or "Elvis." Adams managed to get hold of some papers that some previous critics had neither had access to or read and just could not believe because they were too far-out or too weird for the genteel audiences they were writing for.

So what is the truth about Thomas Eakins? He was one sick puppy, that's for sure. Just how sick is unknown. And quite frankly, even if he was a puppy molester it still would not change what his art looks like. Eakins was smart enough to destroy most of his writings and did not give interviews since he claimed his art should do the talking.

And it speaks much louder and more eloquently than this book. For example, "The Four in Hand." It's the nickname of my favorite painting "The Fairman Rogers Four In Hand: A May Morning in the Park". When I could get to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (back before they charged an arm and a leg for admission) I would sit on the bench in front of this painting and get lost in it for ages.



This painting gets dismissed in a page. Adams calls it "chilling" due to the expressions of the people in the carriage.

Whu --? Who CARES about the people? The painting focuses on the four gorgeous bays doing all of the work. That's all I'd look at. The horses are dismissed as having their legs in the wrong positions for carriage horse teams. The book lost a star just for that.



On the plus side, you do get to see a young Thomas Eakins naked. He liked being naked. Unfortunately, you also get to see an old fat Elvis-like Thomas Eakins naked, too. Brace yourself. You thought "The Gross Clinic" was gross, well, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.

There are some drawings, photographs and reproductions of paintings in here. Unfortunately, they are all in black and white, which really kills whatever point Adams was trying to make about clues to Eakins' madness in his paintings.

In conclusion, if you read just one book about Thomas Eakins, don't make it this one. Life is too short.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of the most bizarre and unpleasant biographies I have ever read. The author shows an obvious and pervasive contempt for both the subject and his art, so much so that you wonder why he wrote a 500-page biography on this artist and not one he actually likes. It seems like he saw the opportunity for an attention-grabbing hit job and took it, and it’s a marvel and a shame that a prestigious university press gave him the opportunity to publish it.

Eakins is not the only person Adams sets his sights on. Most of Eakins’ previous biographers receive his ire as well, though Adams then goes on to quote, paraphrase, and cite uncritically these same biographers extensively throughout the book. In some respects, this is the best available biography of Eakins written in this century because of the copious citations and bibliographic research. However, when you look closely at the actual words from other sources cited, you find that they have often been selectively quoted and isolated from their original context. Because the documentary evidence created during Eakins’s lifetime is so thin (much was apparently destroyed by himself, his widow, or the executors of their estate), all biographers have had to rely on interviews conducted many years after Eakins’ death with those who knew him. The main source of these interviews is Eakins’ first biographer, Lloyd Goodrich, who took no notes during these interviews and did not have anyone else record or transcribe the interviews, but who scribbled out a few pages of notes after each one the evening after it had been conducted. Goodrich then wrote his biography based almost entirely on these notes. So already most of what we know about Eakins comes second-hand from oral histories collected decades after the events occurred. I have looked at some of Goodrich’s notes and not only do the interviewees sometimes contradict each other, they sometimes contradict themselves and get dates and facts wrong that are easily verifiable through the documentary evidence that does exist. Coming back to Adams, he will often cite Goodrich’s work based on interviews, taking Goodrich to task for inferences and interpretations that he disagrees with, but when he agrees with Goodrich or has no counterargument, he quietly cites him with an endnote and no mention of the name of the interview subject in the text. If you want to know where the information came from, you have to go to Goodrich’s book and look it up yourself there and then you find that Goodrich doesn’t name the source either. Even worse, Adams will often cite another biographer of Eakins as a source, and when you look up the citation in that biography, its own citation points to another source which is often, yes, Goodrich. So the information then is third-hand, and coming from Adams, now fourth-hand. Worryingly, many of Adams’ wilder assertion are unsourced at all. One such assertion states that Eakins “did not like Jews,” a claim made by an unnamed source which is not cited, and this single assertion is the basis for Adams’ claim that Eakins was an anti-semite, a claim that receives no additional mention or follow-up discussion. It is only there to underline what a horrible human being Adams thinks Eakins was.

Adams’ book also functions as a critique of Eakins’ work and here it is even more troubling. I have no doubt that Adams is a respected art historian and educator with a long career, but much of his interpretation is undergraduate level spot-the-symbolism work based on the most obvious and superficial reading of Freudian concepts, an approach very popular in the humanities in the 1970s and 1980s. Every image of buttocks in Eakins’ work implies anal sex, every object longer than it is wide is a phallus (unless it’s a coffin), every implement used for cutting is a symbol of castration anxiety, every man in a painting is looking at another man’s crotch, and so forth. When Eakins portrays a female subject in anything less than the most flattering way, he is a misogynist (even though it’s Adams who complains that the boobs on the female subjects aren’t big enough). When Eakins does portray a woman flatteringly, it’s because Eakins clearly wanted to have sex with her. Even a portrait of Eakins’ baby niece playing with blocks becomes the site of gender confusion, rape, murder, death, and a harbinger of the girl’s eventual mental illness and suicide. Adams goes on and on like this about Eakins’ work and then starts in on any critic past or present who does not see what he sees. One female scholar on Eakins who is unsympathetic to these kinds of readings comes in for particular abuse by Adams who characterizes her as essentially wrong, stupid, and a bad feminist. It’s an appalling section of the book that should have been excised entirely and could have been without any impact whatsoever, and one could say that about roughly a third of the book.

The most troubling aspect of this book—yes, it gets worse—is how Adams combines his wild Freudian interpretations of Eakins’ work with some of the more thinly sourced facts and pervasive rumors of Eakins’ life to provide a Freudian interpretation of his life. To summarize Adams’ so-called findings, he accuses Eakins of having had incestuous relations with his father, mother, sister, and niece; of driving that niece to suicide; of being addicted to narcotics; of being an impotent sadist, exhibitionist, and voyeur; of possibly sexually assaulting several of his female students and driving at least one of them insane as a result; of being so feminine and passive as to be possibly homosexual and/or wishing to become a woman—yes, Adams really does equate homosexuality with effeminacy and passiveness and really does conflate homoeroticism in Eakins’ work with homosexual acts, paraphilia, and gender dysphoria—and of possibly performing bestiality. This last conclusion and many of the others here are based on totally unrelated psychological case studies and conversations with mental health professionals who appear to have diagnosed Eakins almost a century after his death. This is extremely unprofessional and unethical on their part, and rather crude and unethical on Adams’ part to include this kind of speculation in what is otherwise meant to be a scholarly biography. To explain all this behavior, it should not come as a surprise that Adams and his consultants have diagnosed Eakins (and several members of his family) as suffering from depression and/or bipolar disorder, which, I suppose, explains why Adams finds it necessary to include a three-page digression on medications which are currently used to treat these conditions. Yet somehow, according to Adams, all of this behavior was still intentional on Eakins’ part.

Finally, though the acknowledgments name an editor, a sub-editor, and several readers, the book appears not to have gone through any sort of editing process at all. There are digressions and repetitions in every chapter, typos and mislabeled photographs, misattributed statements, and incorrect page citations.

At one point, Adams quotes Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist.” There is certainly a lot of feeling exercised in this book, much more so than any actual scholarship or serious artistic critique, and if this book is indeed a portrait of its own creator, then I believe Adams comes off much worse than his portrayal of his subject.

[Ellen Cutler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite the exploration of an artist I have always found challenging to look at and difficult to teach. The book was a gift from my husband who feeds me good art history and knows that I much enjoyed Henry Adams' "Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock," which, by the way, I highly recommend.

"Eakins Revealed" is both biography and monograph. It's key premise is a that most Eakins scholars, starting with and especially Lloyd Goodrich in the 1930s, misread the artist's intentions, style and place in American art, forcing the square peg of high esteem into the irregular and jagged hole the known facts and visual evidence of the paintings themselves. In particular he looks at Eakins life and art through the lens of classical Freudian theory--and, boy, has it been a while since I have encountered ANYONE giving Freud's ideas that much weight in recent decades.

My copy of the book is filled with Post-It notes commenting on various points. The structure of the book which is partly chronological (like a biography) and partly thematic can test the reader's patience. There are frequent digressions that explain a variety of issues from Freud's Oedipal theories to psychological disorders, especially bipolar disorder, and behavioral issues including incest and exhibitionism.

And in the case of many of the arguments--and for the book as a whole--I go along thinking "Yep, I see that, that's interesting, a definite possibility, how interesting.... NO! I am definitely not on board with that conclusion."

As for the rating, I would give Adams five stars for taking me somewhere I did not expect to go, four stars for the writing and production of the text, and three stars for its accessibility to the more casual reader.

Chapter 19, "Love of Looking," essentially rehashes and restates all the arguments, and, had me wondering when he was going to wrap it all up. It's a lot of work to get to the conclusion--the one conclusion I agree with--that "one can see that in fundamental ways, much of Eakins's behavior was not so much malevolent as infantile."

As an art historian and teacher of art history I have long struggled with Eakins' paintings. There were a goodly number I just though not worth the praise heaped on them. I often found myself getting restless during discussions of the brilliance of Eakins' use of perspective, particularly in the boating pictures, or visual effects, like the appearance of the wheels in "Fairman Rogers' Four-In-Hand," and thinking, "yes, and I should care about this because???" I went out of my way to see "The Gross Clinic" at its old home at the the Jefferson Medical College and found it powerful. I always found the portrait of Amelia Van Buren faintly disturbing and often paused in front of it at the Phillips Collection.

I think Adams gets too lost in proving that Freud was right but I think his excursion down this road with Freud as his guide took him to some very interesting places.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book goes against the grain of Eakins scholarship. But its view of Eakins as sexually obsessed makes a lot of his work understandable. The portrait of his emaciated-looking wife and paintings of his students where he showed them twenty to forty years older than they actually were indicate a misogynist streak. So the question arises, all the efforts he made to allow women access to full male nudity--were they efforts to advance women's careers or to shock and torment them? I've read art historians on both sides of the issue and it is hard to come to a conclusion.

[📚Linda Blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomas Eakins is a preeminent American artist, so I was interested in learning more about him. This book provides a fascinating portrait of Eakins especially his idiosyncrasies, however there was lots of redundancy in the book. I also found the interpretations of his art to be somewhat far flung, but I am not an art scholar as Adams is.