LOS ANGELES, CA.-The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA) presents Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins,
on view from July 25 to October 17, 2010. Organized exclusively for
LACMA by Ilene Susan Fort, the museum’s Gail and John Liebes Curator of
American Art, the exhibition celebrates the museum’s acquisition of
Eakins’s last great sporting painting, Wrestlers (1899)—one of the
single most important American paintings acquired in the history of
LACMA. Featuring around 60 oil paintings, drawings, watercolors,
photographs, and sculpture by the great American master, the exhibition
serves as a rare opportunity to examine for the first time the entire
range of sporting images by this iconic American artist.
"Eakins considered the body amazingly beautiful and a remarkable
mechanism of movement,” said Fort. "In his images from the late
nineteenth-century of the athletic figure in action, Eakins created a
new modern American hero; the sportsman—who can still be admired today
by athletes and sports enthusiasts, as well as connoisseurs of great
art.”
Manly Pursuits is organized chronologically, from the 1870s to 1899, and thematically by type of physical endeavor.
1870s: Rowing, Sailing, Hunting and Coaching Eakins began his career by depicting one of the activities he had
missed while a student in Paris: rowing. His native Philadelphia was
instrumental in developing sculling into a modern competitive sport.
Although sun and fresh air pervade these river scenes, Eakins recorded
the races with the precision and mathematical interest of a scientist.
On view with their related paintings will be the large-scale perspective
drawings in which he calculated the position of boats, oars, waves and
even reflections.
Eakins also sailed and hunted and was skillful with a rifle. After
he contracted malaria while hunting in one of the local marshes, he
abandoned participating in the sport, and transferred his interest,
instead, to painting it.
His most colorful and impressionistic scene, Fairman Rogers’
Four-in-Hand was the sole example Eakins devoted to the upper
middle-class activity of coaching (the art of driving horse-drawn
carriages). It also was perhaps his most controversial sporting canvas
since in it he attempted to depict the movement of the horses and wheels
with photographic accuracy—an impulse many critics found to be at odds
with the art of painting.
1880s: Swimming and Photography At the end of the nineteenth century, swimming was deemed one of the
most democratic of sports, especially in the United States, where
doctors encouraged urban dwellers to maintain a healthy body through
exercise. Eakins devoted his sole sporting canvas of the 1880s to this
subject. Swimming (1884-85) was also one of the major paintings in which
he demonstrated his new interest in photography. On view will be
photographs that helped Eakins compose the scene along with his
scientific studies of human anatomy and posture and his experimental
motion photographs.
1890s: Boxing and Wrestling Eakins’s last sporting images feature boxers and wrestlers and
showcase the new indoor spectator sports that attracted the attention of
middle and working-class enthusiasts. These paintings, some of which
rank among the artist’s largest canvases, are ironically among his least
known endeavors in the sporting genre. Boxing and wrestling imagery was
typically modest in scale and relegated to journalistic reports and
advertising. But the substantial size of Eakins’s depictions elevated
the sport to a new level of importance and its athletes to a new heroic
stature. Remarkably, the three canvas versions of the Wrestlers
paintings (two of which now belong to LACMA) have not been seen together
since they left the artist’s studio over a century ago. The LACMA
exhibition will historically reunite them. In addition, the wrestling
paintings will be shown along with a group of related wrestling
photographs that were recently discovered and have never before been
exhibited.
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) Although Eakins is now considered one of the great masters of
nineteenth-century American art, his work, surprisingly, has not been
extensively exhibited on the West Coast. During his lifetime, the artist
showed close to home, primarily in Philadelphia and nearby New York
City. Not until the end of his life, in 1915, did he display on the West
Coast, at the Panama- Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. After his
death, Eakins’s widow, in a concerted effort to sell some of the
extensive oeuvre that remained in her possession, organized traveling
exhibitions of his paintings. The 1927 West Coast tour of twenty-five
paintings was the first and last showing of Eakins paintings in Los
Angeles—until now.
Manly Pursuits enables the West Coast community to again experience
Eakins’s art in depth and demonstrates LACMA’s unique role in Eakins
studies.
