Word: eakinses
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It may provoke a twinge of concern. Does Sargent signal a retreat from the standards the Whitney has battled for -- the commitment to glitz that gave us the 1985 Biennial, the taste for inflated prettiness set forth in its Alex Katz retrospective, the reluctance to edit that made Eric Fischl...
But the exhibition opens all manner of tantalizing questions about the supposed isolation of American art, particularly after 1850, when it was almost taken for granted that the successful home artist would have to study either in Düsseldorf or, more likely, in Paris. It is true that some...
These academics, once scorned by modernist taste but now almost as rehabilitated as their pupils, gave new American art its pedigree. At one point Gérôme had 90 American students. As an American critic remarked in 1864, "We have not time to invent and study everything anew...
Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, 1875, certainly bridges two cultural worlds. On the one hand, one can read it as a very American icon of progress; it is a fervent, secular celebration of objective scientific knowledge, with the realism of paint serving that of science. Dr. Gross, light shining...
Yet at the same time it is a very "European" picture, full of the eye-grabbing devices that the 31-year-old Eakins, still fresh from Europe, knew would make it stand out in a crowded salon: blood and darkness, baroque composition, and the melodrama of the horrified wife on...