Art museums make my father uneasy. He patiently reads the explanatory text and then starts asking questions, questions that I haltingly try to answer.
By the time we leave the museum, one of us is usually mad. To some artists, such a reaction is like oxygen. They just like to make you angry. With sex. Or men. Always ingenious, Eakins devised endless ways to put naked or nearly naked people in his pictures. He painted a brutally realistic crucifixion scene; a group of men naked at a swimming hole; a sculptor in his studio with a young female model and chaperone ; and classical figures in a meadow, with and without their togas.
Eakins constantly strived to create convincing illusions, and long before it was fashionable, he used photographs to further his goal. He often succeeded too well. In , Eakins portrayed world-famous surgeon Samuel Gross in the midst of an operation, and submitted the portrait for the art display at the United States Centennial Exhibition.
But the judges saw simply a bloody document and sent the painting to a hall for medical instruments. About 10 years later, Eakins presented an idyllic scene of men swimming in the river for one of his most important patrons, but the patron politely sent it back, asking for a painting that he could donate to an art museum someday. It is a horizontal canvas, smaller than your sofa is long, showing six naked men and a big red dog, swimming in a river on a sunny day.
One of them appears to be Eakins himself. Viewers must have always seen that it expressed great pleasure in male companionship. Many call him one of the first gay artists in America. Because more than anything else, Eakins wanted his art to make people uncomfortable, even angry.
