{"id":118984,"date":"2017-12-06T13:00:23","date_gmt":"2017-12-06T18:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118984"},"modified":"2017-12-13T13:27:21","modified_gmt":"2017-12-13T18:27:21","slug":"reading-lines-gilded-age-drawings-met","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/06\/reading-lines-gilded-age-drawings-met\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Between the Lines: \u201cGilded Age Drawings at The Met\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson.<\/em> 1878<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cGilded Age Drawings at The Met\u201d is a curious attic cleaning of an exhibition. It includes the seldom seen Thomas Eakins 1878 watercolor The Dancing Lesson<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>featured\u00a0on the show\u2019s advertising. The painting is not an obvious choice to exemplify the Gilded Age, and yet, in its reproduction, it is\u00a0given an importance that is otherwise left unexplained. The exhibition includes a hodgepodge of other\u00a0work, some of it by lesser lights, and lacks accompanying material about the relationship between art and era. Perhaps more explicit commentary would have run the risk of offending the patron class upon whose riches the Met always has depended. The Walton Family Foundation funded this exhibition, an irony too large to remark upon except to confirm in Jamesian sotto voce that, yes, Walmart supplied the fortune. Three of the paintings shown are intended bequests.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Thomas Eakins, The Pathetic Song,<\/em>\u00a01881.<\/p><\/div>\n

Lush portraits by Louis Comfort Tiffany, John Singer Sargent, and Mary Cassatt reinforce our dutiful impressions of the undeniable aesthetic pleasures of material wealth as well as the dreamy sadness leisure can bring, especially within the domestic sphere. A drawing of a woman done in silverpoint by Thomas Wilmer Dewing has a timeless quality, amplified by the use of an antique artistic technique. There also is the seductive suggestion that the past can be bought or had\u2014if only one has money or sensibility enough. Eakins himself often painted and photographed women in historical dress and was as capable as any artist at getting lost in the luxurious folds of a fine damask or watered silk. We can see that in The<\/em> Pathetic Song <\/em>(1881),<\/em> another Eakins watercolor included in the exhibition. The viewer can hear the rustle of the singer\u2019s dress as well as the purity of her voice. Equally heard are the pianist\u2019s maniacal focus (Eakins\u2019s wife, Susan, was the model) and the cellist\u2019s perhaps less accomplished accompaniment\u2014isn\u2019t he just a quarter beat off tempo? The homey setting reinforces the tame and unthreatening democratic ideal that true art can be created anywhere, even in the front parlor.<\/p>\n

It is Eakins\u2019s earlier, carefully worked watercolor, originally titled Study of Negroes<\/em>, that suggests the more revolutionary idea that art belongs as well to the dispossessed\u2014that it is, perhaps, the first fruit of freedom. This canvas also depicts a grouping of three: a sturdy boy of at most eight years old dancing, a slender young man playing the banjo, and, in the center, a man as wiry as a child but old enough to be their grandfather. The clothing is again there to be touched, the music to be heard. The child wears the rough blue and gray homespun attire of a laborer, his pants rolled to the knee to reveal his dancing legs; the young man is clad in a clean but somehow aspirational white shirt and less laundered black trousers; the old man supplies the pizazz with his frayed orange jacket worn over a rusty black suit, top hat and cane resting on a chair at his side. The boy looks to the banjo player, perhaps for guidance; the banjo player stares out as if into the music itself; and the older man scrutinizes the boy, his foot lifted as if moving to the beat or perhaps to demonstrate a step. Theirs is a circle of intent: the music, the dance, the boy initiated into their mysteries.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Eakins himself, though, completes the circle. Ghost, witness, audience, fellow artist, he faces the old man and suggests a mirror: one artist can\u2019t exist without the other. The iconoclastic Eakins may well have seen race as irrelevant to serious artistic intent, although The Dancing Lesson<\/em> brought him one of the only prizes in his career, suggesting it probably was seen as a conventional work of \u201clocal color.\u201d More telling, perhaps, is that Eakins soon after took on as a student Henry Ossawa Tanner, a young African American painter who later would study in Paris with G\u00e9r\u00f4me, Eakins\u2019s very own teacher. (A minor work of Tanner\u2019s is included in the exhibition.)<\/p>\n

Two other figures in the watercolor serve to reinforce the sense of an artistic intent that is ultimately subversive rather than sentimental. Floating in the upper left-hand corner on an otherwise bare wall is a small oval-framed portrait of a seated Abraham Lincoln looking down at a large book, almost certainly an album, while his youngest son, Tad, looks over his shoulder. The original photograph of this moving scene was taken in Matthew Brady\u2019s studio by Anthony Berger; the image was widely disseminated after Lincoln\u2019s assassination when an engraving of it appeared on the cover of Harper\u2019s Weekly<\/em>. Eakins\u2019s rendering of it in The Dancing Lesson<\/em> is no more than a rough sketch, but the knowing viewer will supply in her mind the necessary detail and imagine the president at once distracted and benevolent. Glasses slipping down his nose, Lincoln folds the boy into his contemplation of whatever he is looking at, perhaps one of Brady\u2019s Civil War photographs. So, too, the painting\u2019s architecture seems to suggest, does the president hold the people he has freed, however tenuously, in his immortal glance.<\/p>\n

Perhaps more than any other work in this attenuated exhibition, The Dancing Lesson<\/em> speaks to the double helix of our past and present gilded ages. The contemporary viewer knows the dead president has not ensured the freedom of those he emancipated; only federal enforcement of the Constitution and its \u201cfreedom amendments\u201d could do that. Eakins\u2019s child dancer with his rough oversized hands and workman\u2019s clothes reminds us that his benevolent fathers, political and artistic, may be powerless to save his labor from being turned to another man\u2019s profit. Then, as now, voting rights were contested and curtailed, nativist leanings were ignited and fanned, and, behind the rhetorical smoke, wealth flowed into the hands of a very few. The reign of a wise fatherlike president may have felt no more real than a faded image upon a wall.<\/p>\n

\u201cGilded Age Drawings at the Met\u201d may be more a curiosity than an event; it seems\u00a0a weak moment for an institution that has educated both the erudite and the uninitiated for so many years. As our great museums struggle to hold onto their collections, foster scholarship, and bring in wider audiences, we more than ever need exhibitions that speak directly to the contradictions of our age\u2014and not merely around them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cynthia Payne lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is at work on a novel.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u201cGilded Age Drawings at The Met\u201d is a curious attic cleaning of an exhibition. It includes the seldom seen Thomas Eakins 1878 watercolor The Dancing Lesson,\u00a0featured\u00a0on the show\u2019s advertising. The painting is not an obvious choice to exemplify the Gilded Age, and yet, in its reproduction, it is\u00a0given an importance that is otherwise left […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1031,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32024],"tags":[32031,32029,30370,32025,10420,32032,32028,32030,32027,32026],"class_list":["post-118984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-art","tag-anthony-berger","tag-gilded-age-drawings-at-the-met","tag-john-singer-sargent","tag-louis-comfort-tiffany","tag-mary-cassatt","tag-matthew-brady","tag-study-of-negroes","tag-the-dancing-lesson","tag-the-pathetic-song","tag-thomas-wilmer-dewing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReading Between the Lines: \u201cGilded Age Drawings at the Met\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Walton Family Foundation funded this exhibition, which seems an irony too large to remark upon.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/06\/reading-lines-gilded-age-drawings-met\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Reading Between the Lines: \u201cGilded Age Drawings at The Met\u201d by Cynthia Payne\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 6, 2017 \u2013   \u201cGilded Age Drawings at The Met\u201d is a curious attic cleaning of an exhibition. 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