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  • Secrets and Lies:Gossip and Art's Histories
  • Jennifer Doyle (bio)
Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist. By Henry Adams. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 608 pages. $40.00 (cloth).
Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963. By Gavin Butt. Durham, N. C.: Duke University, 2006. 232 pages. $74.95 (cloth). $21.95 (paper).

Half the pleasure of reading Henry Adams's biography Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist lies in absorbing the weird but juicy bits of information that make for fun gossip. The Philadelphia artist dressed like a slob, drank a quart of milk a day, and threatened people occasionally with his revolver. His mother gave him an intestinal purge to cure him of "outbursts of sentimental poetry in grammar school." He preferred sitting on the floor to sitting in a chair, and walked around the house in his underwear, even in the presence of company. Other information expands on the rumors and scandals that shaped the artist's career, and is more weighty and difficult to absorb.

As we look at the development of Eakins's biography, and explore how generations of scholars have revised gossip on the artist, we learn at least as much about the practice of American art history—about its needs and anxieties—as we do about Eakins himself. Gossip—the stories we tell and how they circulate—often tells us more about the groups of people who produce it than it does about the subjects of the gossip itself. This insight is at the heart of the story that Gavin Butt tells in his study of discourse on sexuality and the artist, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963. This book tracks major shifts in the disciplinary narratives about the artist as a social type, via his reading of the gossip about New York artists such as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Larry Rivers—gossip that (as is the case with Eakins) invariably centers on the artists' sexuality.

Pulling together the full range of available material on Eakins (including stories suppressed but preserved in the papers of Lloyd Goodrich, one of the [End Page 511] artist's early biographers), Henry Adams approaches the artist's oeuvre as a psychological mystery. Drawing links between Eakins's relationships, his idiosyncratic behavior, and the persistence of certain themes in his art, Adams hypothesizes that Eakins was a deeply troubled man, wracked with anxiety about sexual difference. He also describes a complex social network held together by a fierce sense of bohemian independence and loyalty, by a shared sense of melancholy, and by the dysfunctional forms of attachment that take shape around charismatic but abusive figures.

Eakins is a particularly rewarding subject for gossipy art history—an ideal combination of the lofty and the low. Biographies traditionally represent him as a maverick who bucked convention, shunning bourgeois and Victorian artifice to paint life "as it is." This story works particularly well because his professional life was shaped by scandal caused by his insistence on using nudity in art instruction (with male and female students present), and by the nature of his work. Haunting Eakins lore are rumors about him carrying on with female relatives "in the manner of Oscar Wilde" and of causing the crisis that led to the suicide of his niece. Eakins gossip took a new turn in the 1980s as scholars began to look more closely at the question of Eakins's sexuality. The obvious homoeroticism of some of his most well known paintings (especially Swimming), when combined with photographs of nude men, and his long-term friendships with younger men (one of whom, Samuel Murray, was at his bedside when he died) suggest that Eakins may have been gay. Eakins scholarship has been divided by this topic in particular. Adams represents the tensions in the field as an ongoing debate between the "traditionalists" (openly invested in reproducing Eakins's stature in art history), and the "revisionists" (who are more likely to read Eakins's paintings as texts, using the methods of American/cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, or queer theory).

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