Thomas Eakins: The Great American Artists

Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,Literary

Thomas Eakins: The Great American Artists Details

About the Author Artist, art critic, and poet Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) is recognized as a major twentieth-century American Intimist painter, whose body of work features lyrical depictions of everyday life and portraits of family members and friends, in the manner of the late-nineteenth-century French artists Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, whose paintings Porter greatly admired. He successfully produced realist work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He has since been hailed by John Ashbery as "perhaps the major American artist of this century." Justin Spring's excellent recent biography, A Life in Art tells Porter's life story--integrating it with his art, art criticism, and poetry--and proves Ashbery's claim. Spring chronicles Porter's upbringing in a wealthy family; his education at Harvard; his youthful travels in Europe and Stalinist Russia; his marriage to Anne Channing Porter, a poet; his bohemian lifestyle, his work as a painter and art critic in New York; and his association with major figures of the American modernist movement, both artists (Alfred Stieglitz, John Marin, Willem de Kooning, and Alex Katz) and poets (John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Frank O'Hara, and, finally, James Schuyler, who lived with the Porters for over a decade). --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more

Reviews

I cannot allow the previous--and only-review of this book go unanswered.True, Porter's comment about Eakins composition suggests an incomprehensiblelack of understanding of his work. Eakins is not, in essence, about composition,or drawing, or brushwork or any other technical skill we could use to parsehis work with. There's a photo of Eakins in the book, the last made of him, on page 29.It shows the artist in shirtsleeves and braces, sitting outside and rubbingthe ear of a dog. No pomp and circumstance; no pretensions to greatness.The unembellished truth would have to do to tell us about him. While Eakins was well-trained and knew the proper academic rules, he used themonly as they furthered his own vision. And that photograph tells us what it was.He was about the reality that could be seen as it revealed the truth.His subjects are revealed sometimes by the objects that define their lives,but most often by their body language and expression. They are a serious,solid bunch, and Eakins paints them as they are, without apology orembellishment. He was a consummately talented and skilled artist,but what he wanted was the truth. Porter is better at describing Eakins' relation to his clients thanthan his "composition" comments would lead us to believe he could be.But he wishes Eakins had given himself more room for flash and color,the kind that Velazquez was able to sneak into the flashiest of his portraitsof Spanish Royals. For my taste there's plenty of flash and color in "Max Schmitt in a Single Shell,"or virtuoso brush work in "The Gross Clinic," but truth is at the heart of both. At our best Americans are people who admire the truth, recognize it and cherish it.Eakins is well-suited to present us to ourselves and remind us of our best.Charlene Stant Engel

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