Art without Culture

Thomas Eakins lived most of his life in Philadelphia. But he spent his early twenties in Paris, studying under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des beaux arts. In 1866, soon after his arrival, he wrote his father a letter describing his reception at the hands of his new peers, raucous art students: "Where do you come from? England? My God no, gentlemen I'm an American. (I feel sure that raised me a peg in their estimation!) Oh the American! What a savage. I wonder if he's a Huron or an Alonquin [sic]."¹ Eakins clearly takes a little delight in experiencing himself as an object of this satiric ethnological attention, in which various and not necessarily compatible registers of human classification—linguistic, national, primitivist, tribal—jostle elbows. In Europe, Eakins wrote to his father, he felt himself to be "a stranger."² At the same time, walking around strapped with a Smith & Wesson, he "represented a familiar national type within a popular French taxonomy of human difference," writes Alan C. Braddock in Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (TE, 57). Braddock's study holds interest not only for art historians and Americanists but, more broadly, for those engaged with the question—both historical and, at this moment of critical reflection on the "cultural turn" in the humanities and social sciences, methodological—of the relationship between aesthetic production and conceptualizations of difference.³

If it would be easy to read such anecdotes of the painter's experience abroad through a framework of cultural difference, it would also be anachronistic. The taxonomies in play at such moments—and, more significantly, throughout Eakins's body of work, as Braddock contends—had little to do with the modern anthropological culture concept. Nor did any of the other ways of thinking about human variation that were historically available to him. It's a commonplace in the historiography of American anthropology that the idea of understanding group differences pluralistically and as socially constructed first gained broad currency under the term cultures over the course of the 1910s, as Franz Boas and his students began to prevail over their freshly professionalized field of study.⁴ Eakins's artistic career was over well before this disciplinary consolidation had been realized. Referring to this chronology, Braddock situates the painter "on the historical threshold of late nineteenth-century aesthetics and subsequent Boasian anthropology" so as to complicate our view of the representation of difference in his work (TE, 37).

Or to confuse it—in 1917, the year after Eakins's death, Alfred L. Kroeber (who completed his dissertation under Boas at Columbia in 1901) described the persistence of social evolutionism alongside cultural relativism as "this current confusion of the organic and the social."⁵ The line, which Braddock cites several times, emerges as the book's subtle refrain. Seeking to correct a scholarly tendency to attribute modern multiculturalist sympathies to the painter, Braddock instead shows how Eakins was influenced by a constellation of "pre-modern" theories of difference: by, for instance, the orientalist conventions of mid-nineteenth-century European painting; by a local-color aesthetic that drew inspiration from Hippolyte Taine's theory of art as the organic expression of "race, milieu, et moment"; and by the social evolutionary hierarchies that dominated the anthropological work going on in Philadelphia in the 1880s and 1890s, primarily in exhibitions at the University Museum at Penn.⁶

It's a revisionist account that doesn't treat the canonical painter with reverence. The evidence of Eakins's general conformity with dominant nineteenth-century theories of race won't engender sympathy. On the other hand, Braddock doesn't dwell on the more lurid aspects of Eakins's biography. This is thus neither the Eakins of Sidney D. Kirkpatrick's Revenge of Thomas Eakins, a technical purist straining against convention, nor that of Henry Adams's Eakins Revealed, an abusive exhibitionist-voyeur.⁷ Indeed, while Braddock is responsible to the critical record...