EAKINS REVEALED: The Secret Life of an American Artist

Don't let the lurid title and subtitle fool you: this is an academic study, full of pedantic asides, boring psychologizing (in which figures in many paintings are mapped onto figures from Eakins's family) and interminable stretches of interpretation of often too-small reproductions (330 b&w in all). But Eakins (1844–1916) is undoubtedly a painter of major interest, and Adams, a formidable art historian who collaborated with Ken Burns on a Thomas Hart Benton documentary for PBS, does have a fresh take that he works out with rigor and care. He links evidence for sexual trauma in Eakins's childhood to evidence of subsequent episodes of violence and sexual misconduct in a manner that is neither prurient nor moralizing. And he displays great affinity for, and astute observations of, the work itself, which includes some of the most striking American paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An entire chapter dedicated to Eakins's ultrarealist operating room depiction The Gross Clinic (1875) proves illuminating all the way through. A reconsideration of the photographs that Eakins both exhibited and worked from contemplates a variety of kinds of nudity, including the "homosocial or homosexual" qualities of some of them. After a chapter on "Inflicting Pain," the book ends with a wrap on Eakins's life and reputation as constructed in the literature, which lingers, in its final pages, on the painter's "pleasure in nakedness." Author tour. (Apr.)

FYI: Also coming out in March is A Drawing Manual by Thomas Eakins, published by Yale University Press in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art ($21.95 100p ISBN 0-300-10847-8); the volume of lectures and drawings approximates one Eakins intended to publish before his forced resignation from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.