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If one uses the concept of
turnings in the broadest sense to describe meditative, social, and physical
movements–to include physical turnings of characters away from participation
in social groups; inward turnings of the bodies and minds of figures upon
themselves; and, most important, turnings of moments of narrative action
or eventfulness into moments of static, pictorial composition–the work
of Thomas Eakins and that of Frank Capra are strikingly similar in many
respects. Such turnings might be said to be the subject of all of Eakins'
work–literally, in paintings like Starting Out after Rail, The Biglin
Brothers Turning the Stake, and Max Schmitt in a Single Scull,
and figuratively, in ones like the portraits of Professor Henry A.
Rowland, Dr. John H. Brinton, and Maude Cook. Eakins was attracted to
painting these instants of contemplation, stillness, or pause between
moments of violent activity (in the sailing, boxing, shooting, and rowing
paintings), and instances of inward–turning contemplation (in the great
portraits) because, like Capra, he wanted to explore the point at which
one sort of eventfulness is replaced by another, the point at which meditative
movements of the mind interrupt or impinge on the world of action and
event.
Such a meditative moment can
take many different forms in Eakins' work, just as it does in Capra's.
The block-building infant giant of Baby at Play is arrested at
that precise moment at which action has been replaced by concentration,
an absolute concentration of attention and effort in which one can feel
the whole mind and spirit of the baby's truly monumental body poised and
utterly concentrated on one square inch of building-block placement. The
pyramidal composition of the painting combined with the effect of the
mutually converging lines of the baby's arms, the pattern of bricks on
the patio, the alignment of the toy horse-cart, and the downward concentration
of the baby's attention indicated by the inclination of her head and the
lighting on her face, absolutely focus the viewer's attention, like the
baby's, on that arrested act of delicate, balanced placement. Everything
in the painting is designed to communicate the complex, concentrated mindfulness
of the baby at this moment and to contrast it with the slack prostration
of the sawdust and rag doll thrown down casually behind her. The state
of focused concentration embodied by the infant truly makes society (even
the society of dolls) irrelevant.
The rowers, sailors, boatmen,
and shooters who are the figures in Eakins' best-known paintings are caught
at similar moments of concentrated, instantaneously arrested balance,
but theirs is an even more complex act of mindfulness than the baby's,
insofar as it usually involves the interaction of two or more figures
in an event of mutual interaction, as when the Biglin brothers yaw their
boat around a turning buoy, or a shooter and his boatman delicately balance
an unstable flat-bottomed boat in position as a shot is fired....
The preceding
material is a brief excerpt from Ray Carney's writing about American painting.
To obtain the complete text of this piece or to read more discussions
of American art, thought, and culture by Prof. Carney, please consult
any of the three following books: American Vision (Cambridge University
Press); Morris Dickstein, ed. The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays
on Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Duke University Press); and Townsend
Ludington, ed. A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States
(University of North Carolina Press). Information about how to obtain
these books is available by clicking
here.
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