Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity Details
Review “[Braddock’s] cogent considerations of the artist’s understanding of ‘the cultural concept’ provide a welcome corrective to anachronistic readings of the artist’s work.” (Akela Reason Art Newspaper 2009-10-01)“[An] exceptional work of scholarship and interpretation.” (CAA Reviews 2010-07-06) Read more From the Inside Flap “In this fascinating study, Alan Braddock considers how recent work dating the emergence of cultural pluralism to the early twentieth century changes the way we understand an important artist like Thomas Eakins. It argues that in championing Eakins as a keen sympathizer with minority 'cultures' in the United States, art historians fall prey to a serious anachronism. Braddock presents a major revision not only of Eakins, but of the intellectual and geographic contours of 'American' realism's encounter with the modern world.”—Brad Evans, Rutgers University“Braddock's book searches out a number of fresh historical contexts for understanding Eakins's work and his sense of himself in relation to his perceptions of the shifting world around him. The author's unflinching appraisal of how Eakins's major paintings participate in the late nineteenth-century discourse of race and culture is richly supported as he evokes the social and intellectual terrain of Eakins's Philadelphia.”—Kathleen Pyne, author of Modernism and the Feminine Voice“Alan Braddock's sensitive, intelligent, and probing book is a breath of fresh air. It looks closely at Eakins's paintings and situates them in the material world of late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where demographic changes were making the variety of human aspects and customs increasingly conspicuous, and in the intellectual world of the time, where a shift in thinking about race and culture was underway. This book brings nagging, heretofore inchoate problems into focus, and resolves them convincingly. It is stimulating and gratifying reading.”—Michael Leja, author of Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp Read more About the Author Alan C. Braddock is Assistant Professor of Art History, Temple University. Read more
Reviews
Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity is an engaging opus that takes as its critical starting point a painting by Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson. From that point on, Alan Braddock, Assistant Professor of Art History at Temple University, takes the reader on a juicy, revisionist picaresque, citing evidence from a mind-boggling variety of sources to reposition the legacy of Eakins in its rightful place. Critics who wrote about Eakins during his day often misinterpreted his art as being sympathetic (even insightful) to other races and cultures. But Braddock, using an array of fascinating source material, argues persuasively that neither Eakins nor his art was a study in cultural sensitivity, as some previous scholars and critics would have us believe. Key among the sources for illuminating this argument is the work of anthropologist Franz Boas, whose theory of cultural diffusion adds a cogent dimension to Braddock's already impressive arguments that debunk prior "scholarship." Braddock purposefully avoids criticizing or vilifying Eakins for his racist and nationalistic viewpoints. Instead he demonstrates that Eakins was a man of his time who drew on the misinformed and misleading theories of some of the most prominent thinkers of his day (Hippolyte Taine, for example). It is this strategy as a writer and historian that make the book so compelling, so complex. Because Eakins would be, in fact, an easy target for such criticism, a sitting duck as it were. But over and over Braddock shows that revisionist history is not this simple. Instead, he exhibits a healthy compassion for Eakins while maintaining a critical edge at the same time. While this is a book that takes a critical look at the life and work of Thomas Eakins and the art critics who wrote about his work, it is also so much more. Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity should be required reading for all future art historians, especially those who aspire to do any sort of pure scholarship. But what stood out for me the most was that this book provokes questions about race and culture that are relevant today. Braddock has issued a compassionate call to everyone to examine more closely, not only issues of race and culture, but to examine ourselves as individuals and our complicated relationships to others.
