Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [66]
RADICAL TEACHING METHOD. As director of the Pennsylvania Academy, Eakins revolutionized art instruction. The accepted practice was to draw from plaster casts of ancient sculpture. Eakins detested such second-hand learning: “The Greeks did not study the antique,” he said. “Nature is just as varied and just as beautiful in our day as she was in the time of Phidias.” He required students to draw the nude from life, studying its motion and anatomy. The idea was ahead of its time: when he insisted on a class of both men and women drawing from what a newspaper called “the absolute nude,” Eakins was fired in disgrace. Indeed, many of Eakins’ attitudes were ahead of their time. When professional careers were closed to women and blacks, he encouraged them to study art. One of his pupils, Henry O. Tanner (1859-1937), became the first important black painter and the most successful black American artist before Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence.
PORTRAITS. From the late 1870s on, Eakins painted mostly portraits. Each captured the essence of the individual, yet because he never flattered a sitter, many customers refused the commissioned works. “The negative response was often brutally discourteous and disagreeable,” wrote his biographer. Of those accepted, an inordinate number — probably 10 percent — were destroyed. Today Eakins is considered America’s finest nineteenth-century painter and, in the opinion of many, the greatest painter America has produced.
Eakins, “Pole-Vaulter: Multiple Exposure Photograph of George Reynolds,” 1884-85, MMA, NY. Eakins was a pioneer in the new technique of photography. Anticipating the invention of the movie camera, he, with Eadweard Muybridge, was first to take rapid, multiple exposures. Eakins used photo sequences of a man running or hurling a javelin to analyze the anatomy of movement.
WHISTLER: ART FOR ART’S SAKE. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was one of the most controversial artists of the nineteenth century and a leading theoretician of the Art for Art’s Sake doctrine. Before a painting is anything else, Whistler maintained, it is, first and foremost, a blank surface covered with colors in varying patterns. His portraits, landscapes, and night pictures were less representations of a subject than experiments in decorative design. He intended no moral uplift in his paintings, saying, “Art should be independent of all claptrap.” This radical notion that a design exists in and of itself, not to describe a subject or tell a story, would later change the course of Western art, just as his paintings were precursors of modern abstraction.
Whistler’s life was as unconventional as his art. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he spent much of his childhood in St. Petersburg, Russia, which he claimed as his birthplace. “I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell,” he said. After flunking out of West Point for a “deficiency in chemistry,” Whistler bounced around without a profession until reading in La Vie de bohème of the wild life of Parisian art students. At the age of 21 he sailed for Europe, never to return to America.
Whistler played the bohemian to the hilt, flaunting his relationship with his red-haired model/mistress and parading conspicuously about London in foppish dress. With his lavish life-style, he was frequently in debt. He pawned his jacket for an iced tea on a hot day, and once, after a meal, announced, “I have just eaten my wash-stand.” Given to public tantrums, Whistler upbraided the “Philistines” who failed to appreciate his work. His insulting diatribes to the press prompted Degas’s warning, “My friend, you behave as if you had no talent.”
Whistler, “Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1,” 1872, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Whistler’s strong sense of pattern and design made him insist that this painting was about shapes and colors, not his mother.
Whistler, “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,” 1875, Detroit Institute of Arts. This painting of fireworks in the night sky foreshadowed abstraction.