Man
Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded-Age Manhood
(Men and Masculinity) by Martin A. Berger
Often
censured during his lifetime for his insistence on studying and
painting from the nude, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is now acclaimed
as one of America's greatest realist painters. Man Made examines
Eakins's art and life, illustrating how the artist used his
canvases to cope with the complex requirements of Victorian
gender. Martin Berger reads a series of Eakins's paintings,
ranging from early to late works, giving a nuanced and elegant
examination of Eakins's portrayal of white, middle-class manhood.
This provocative cultural art history treats these paintings in
terms of what they reveal about Eakins's own identity as well as
the nation's changing ideals of manhood during the final years of
the nineteenth century.
"Berger's
original readings provide altogether new and compelling ways to
understand some of Eakins's most well-known paintings."
(Alexander Nemerov, Stanford University ) "This book is most
interesting. Berger rereads a number of Eakins's paintings and
makes use of recent investigations about the meaning of manhood in
the nineteenth century. Man Made casts much of Eakins's
life and work into new light." (Elizabeth Johns, author of Thomas
Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life ) "During the last
decade, Martin Berger has been the most perceptive and
sophisticated critic of masculinity in nineteenth-century American
art. With this book he consolidates that analysis
triumphantly--and extends its implications, first into a
consideration of all of Eakins's oeuvre, and then into related
discourses of sexuality, domesticity, and race. Man Made
has useful things to say to scholars in all fields of American
culture. In addition, it now becomes the most interesting book on
Eakins since Elizabeth Johns's groundbreaking work, Thomas
Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life, first published nearly
twenty years ago." -- Bruce Robertson, University of
California, Santa Barbara
Thomas
Eakins and the Swimming Picture by Doreen Bolger
(Editor), Sarah Cash (Editor)
"One of
the chief reasons that Thomas Eakins' Swimming compels admiration
is its overwhelming quiet - a stillness not of lassitude or ease
but of taut balance sustained on many levels." "...on
the surface the scene in Swimming pays clear homage to the natural
life, featuring six men, swimming, sunning, naked, and at ease
with themselves. The only overt signs of domestication in the
benign landscape they inhabit is the stone platform - too orderly
to be natural but having no obvious present use to justify the
effort of its construction - and the dog. No bathing houses or
other reminders of a resort establishment, no pile of discarded
shoes or stiff collars intrudes to suggest another existence, of
labor or a wider society, to which they must ultimately return.
They are released, it seems, from late-nineteenth-century urban
protocols."
