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Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Sep 2, 2011; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8
Exhibit explores relationship between painting, photography PICTURE PERFECT Art Issues MALIN WILSON-POWELL For the Journal
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s ambitious summer exhibition “Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph” has only two more weekends to run before it closes. The show opens with masterpieces by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and, as far as can be surmised, this is the first and only time his work has been exhibited in Santa Fe. Over the decades I have traveled long distances to see Eakins’ paintings, returning multiple times to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose collection includes 50 Eakins paintings from his estate, along with his anatomical casts and wax models. Eakins was a lifelong student of science who was committed to rendering his subjects honestly. He sold few canvasses during his life and his commissioned portraits were often rejected due to their intense psychological probing. His portrait of Walt Whitman, however, was the poet’s favorite. Although considered a bohemian by Philadelphia society and dismissed as a teacher for undressing in front of a female student to explain the movement of the pelvis, since his death he has been posthumously vindicated. Today, he is recognized as America’s greatest and most influential realist painter. In 1875, Eakins hired a leading professional commercial photography firm to reproduce “The Gross Clinic” as soon as he completed it, to check the tonal structure in the black-and-white documentation. This magnificent and, certainly, the artist’s most notorious painting is a depiction of the then-most advanced surgical procedure for removing a diseased thighbone. A year in the making, it was unveiled to widespread derision and purchased by the college for only $200. In 2006, after Thomas Jefferson University agreed to sell this monumental work for $68 million, a group of donors paid that price to keep the painting in Philadelphia (instead of a proposed joint ownership by Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas and the National Gallery of Art in D.C.). Eakins was markedly athletic in his youth, and while enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1860s, he also studied anatomy and dissection at the Jefferson Medical College. From 1866 to 1870 Eakins studied art in Europe, most notably in Paris, writing home to decry “affectation” as John Updike noted in his essay “The Ache in Eakins” (1992). At the time, Paris was at the center of photographic innovation, with Nadar’s portrait photography studio famous at the very center of cultural and intellectual life in Paris. Eakins returned to Philadelphia where during the next 40-plus years he painted some 250 unsentimental “photographic” portraits, a collective portrait of the intelligentsia of his hometown. During his time in Paris, Eakins studied with French realists painters Jean-Leon Gerome and Leon Bonnat, who used photography as studies. In the 1870s Eakins was impressed by Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies using 12 cameras to record the sequence a trotting horse. In 1879 Eakins acquired his own camera and developed his own technique for capturing nude figures in motion on a single, moveable plate, as did the French physiologist Etienne Jules Marey in 1883. From its inception, photography has been an international phenomenon, with every innovation spreading like wildfire across every continent. On view at the O’Keeffe are two important Eakins canvasses accomplished with the aid of his photographs, supplemented by oil sketches and modern digital copies of his photographs, thought to number in the thousands. To construct the frieze of silhouetted figures in the canvas “Mending the Net,” 1881, Eakins selected figures from separate photographs, included the seated man from one; tree and wooden spools another, with the figures mending and two girls watching each from a different photograph, as well as the flock of geese in the foreground. For such composite compositions Eakins projected images onto the canvas using a “Magic Lantern, ” a 17th century invention. The other major Eakins canvas on view is titled “Arcadia,” ca. 1883, and it is shown with a reproduction photograph of one of his students nude playing the pipes of Pan. A scandal during his life and now very sweet looking, it is the kind of Eakins imagery that has been of interest to academics studying sexuality and surrounded by speculations of homoeroticism. Particularly instructive is his “Motion Study: George Reynolds Nude, Pole Vaulting to Left,” 1885, when seen in juxtaposition to the Muybridge “Animal Locomotion” studies here, 1872 -ca. 1887. While both artists retain the thrum of multiple exposures of movement, Muybridge’s sequential and separate exposures formatted in grids are fragmented precursors of cinema. In contrast, Eakins’ arc of action unified within a single frame is a beautiful and satisfying composition in itself. Of course, Eakins paintings benefit from frequent, contemplative viewings, as does all really great art. This will be tough to accomplish at the always-popular O’Keeffe Museum where it is difficult to see through the milling crowds, much less sit and ponder. Although essential and foundational to any exposition of how painting and photography have spilled into each other, Eakins is only a small introductory chapter in this multi-faceted exhibition, which features the work of 41 American artists from Eakins to the present. The show includes the obvious, the predictable, and the unexpected. Among the best groupings is the sideby-side hanging of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “No 17 –Special,” 1919, charcoal drawing on paper, and Alfred Steiglitz’s “Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands” (also 1919) with her elegant hands posed in front of her drawing. While O’Keeffe’s drawing has the fuzz of early pictorialist photographs by Steiglitz and others, the image relates most closely to Paul Strand’s abstract photography that she praised: “Strand has added to photography in that he has bewildered the observer into considering shapes, in an obvious manner, for their own inherent value …to arrest one’s attention.” There is an iconic but astonishing Charles Sheeler painting “Steam Turbine,” 1939, and interesting Ben Shahn composite paintings with his photographic sources. The paintings of Henry Koerner and Honore Sharer, both underrecognized post-World War II artists, who similarly combine multiple sources into fantasy tableaux, are prominently featured. Sharer’s 1958 egg tempera and oil painting titled “The Reception” certainly deserves much broader attention. Among the very contemporary work, the paintings and drawings of Chuck Close never fail to win attention. The ideas for the exhibition were generated during a 2006 Research Center symposium attended by the eight authors published in the “Shared Intelligence” catalogue. This helps to explain some of the more eccentric selections such as Koerner and Sharer, who are the subject of academic research. Also, like many large museum projects in recent decades, the compilation and choices are diverse and offer widely disparate viewpoints. “Shared Intelligence” contributors range from characterizing the relationship between painting and photography as “fraught” to “quaint” in Suzanne Hudson’s concluding essay. She asks: “Why talk about [photography] as a coherent subject at all?” If you go WHAT: “Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph” WHERE: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St. WHEN: Through Sept. 11. COST: $10 general; $5 New Mexico resident; $8 student (18+); $8 senior (60+); $5 military/law enforcement. CONTACT: 946-1000
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COURTESY THE PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM “History of a Jump,” 1884-85, is a photographic motion study by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916).
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“Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph” remains on view through Sept. 11 at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Photography pioneer Alfred Stieglitz made this palladium print portrait of his wife titled “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait — Hands” in about 1919.
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