Today, Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) is generally recognized as an American master; indeed, some place him at the very pinnacle of American art. The Gross Clinic, completed by Eakins in 1875 after a year of torturous effort and now regarded as the centerpiece of his career, was recently the object of a heated bidding war between the city of Philadelphia and a very rich buyer who wished to add it to her collection of American treasures in another state. The monumental 2002 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its accompanying catalogue, which launched a new wave of interest in the artist’s career, featured some of Eakins’s best, including The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull) from 1871, Swimming (1885) and Singing a Pathetic Song (1881).
 
Now, several new biographies have dredged up the old controversies and scandals that tainted his career. The precipitating event was the discovery, in 1984, of the Charles Bregler Collection of thousands of Eakins documents, letters, memorabilia and photographs, hidden away for almost a century. Purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1985, these documents are examined in great detail by Henry Adams in Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (Oxford University Press, 2005). They have done much to lend credence to the original charges that led to Eakins’s dismissal as Professor of Drawing and Painting by the directors of the Pennyslvania Academy in 1885. Indeed, the book raises several additional new charges of bizarre personal behavior. Adams’s research also supports the contention that Lloyd Goodrich, in the first (1933) biography of Eakins, “reported information very selectively, suppressing things that seemed odd about Eakins’s behavior, and even deliberately altering facts to support his view of Eakins’s character.”¹ It all makes for a remarkably interesting read, with sordid twists and turns, several deaths, suicides, breakdowns and insanity…

My recent viewing of two special exhibitions—“Holy Image*Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai,” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and “Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych,” at the National Gallery of Art—brings to light a rarely discussed characteristic of religious art. While categorized by specialists from church historians and theologians to art historians as devotional, these works of Christian art might be better identified as religious intimacies.
 
Every special exhibition, like every work of art, has a story to tell, a message to relate and an experience to be encountered. At the Getty exhibition I found myself strongly moved by two icons entitled Diptych with the Virgin Hodegetria and The Descent from the Cross (Constantinople, c. 1400). On the left was an icon of the Theotokos, as Mary is identified in Eastern Christianity, holding her young son. The gentle curve of the Theotokos’ carefully positioned right hand directs us not simply to the youthful child who rests on her left hand, but beyond him to the attached icon and specifically to the conjoined heads of the dead Christ and his mother. Thus, the beginning of the narrative directs our attention to the end, if not the rationale, for the finale. He is born to die, and by dying redeems humanity; she is the Theotokos, the “God-Bearer,” who agrees to bring him into the world, nurture him and then watch him die for the salvation of fallen humankind…

Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) was a force in American art for much of the nineteenth century. His richly detailed woodland and mountain landscapes helped define the Hudson River School, and his plein-air Studies from Nature, which he exhibited alongside more finished paintings, are perennially fresh.

This summer the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado will be presenting simultaneous solo exhibitions of paintings by Lani Irwin and Alan Feltus, American artists based in Assisi, Italy. The title of Irwin’s show, “The Illusionist,” could be a reference to the mimetic magic of the accomplished representational artist, but it also points to the specific iconography of her recent work. The carnival is her milieu here, with acrobats and fortunetellers shifted from the hurly-burly of the real-world sideshow to the rarefied fictive space of Irwin’s paintings.

It is hard to overestimate the historical importance of Claude Lorrain (1604/05–82), whose landscape compositions were a model for the genre for nearly two centuries. Born in a French village, Claude traveled to Italy as a teenager and had established a home in Rome, near the Piazza di Spagna, by 1627. His genius lay in adjusting the balance between history painting and landscape. Claude’s figures—drawn from the Bible, legend and especially the classical past—were kept small. Trees, water and light were no longer part of a decorative backdrop; they were principal players in the pictorial drama. Claude’s compositions are beautifully balanced, both dynamic and serene, and he found inventive ways of integrating background, foreground and middle distance. The Claudian coulisse, a shadowy foreground proscenium, was a widely imitated device. Yet his formulas never turn stale because he was a keen and sensitive observer of nature, often sketching en plein air in the Roman campagna. American audiences now have an unusual opportunity to study Claude’s working methods, thanks to the exhibition “Claude Lorrain—The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum,” which (after a debut at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco) is on view this spring at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The history of American museums is rooted in narratives of individual lives. “Loving Art: The William & Anna Singer Collection,” at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland, tells the story of an American couple who amassed a collection of over 3,000 objects between 1900 and 1940.

“Painterly Controversy: William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri,” at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, juxtaposes the art and pedagogy of two successful turn-of-the-century painters, illuminating an important shift in American art.

Maine is a perennial magnet for landscapists, and James Mullen (b. 1962) has staked out a slice of the coastline as his special province. In the best works in “Time and Tides,” his recent exhibition at Sherry French Gallery in New York City, the spaghetti-box format seems a particularly apt fit for the shallow pools and shoals of trees he depicts. The 20-by-60-inch Bowman Island II (2006) is a successful example of his signature formula. A low island of trees on the horizon and a foreground coulisse of mossy rocks provide structure for the shimmering expanse of light-reflecting water. The exhibition title alludes to the carpe diem message of an old adage, about the forces of nature waiting for no man, but Mullen’s work is strangely becalmed.

In our current infatuation with electronic publishing and virtual imagery—a step beyond what Walter Benjamin called the age of mechanical reproduction—we sometimes forget what a precious and pleasurable thing the physical art object can be. Recently, George Billis Gallery in New York City featured a show of collages by Maureen Mullarkey that brought together word and image in a very tangible way.

The contemporary figurative painting revival is a multifaceted phenomenon. This spring Eleanor Ettinger Gallery in New York City presented a solo exhibition of works by one of the true believers of classical realism, Daniel Graves (b. 1949). In 1991 Graves founded the Florence Academy of Art, predicated on a “return to discipline in art, to canons of beauty, and to the direct study of nature and the old masters as the foundation for great painting.” Graves’s belief in academic tradition is reflected in his own training, which includes study at the Atelier Lack in Minneapolis and with Nerina Simi, whose father, the Florentine painter Filadelfo Simi, had studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme.