Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Through Oct. 24

Americans’ obsession with athletics seems to have begun sometime in the 19th century, said Katharine Albritton in The Art Newspaper. By 1870, when Thomas Eakins returned home from a period spent studying painting in Paris, “sport had come to epitomize modern life” in his native country. The wealthy used newfound leisure time to sail, hunt, and ride horses, while lower classes turned out in large numbers to watch boxing and wrestling matches. Nevertheless, it was an unprecedented leap for the young artist to treat sweaty proletarian pursuits as subjects for serious art. Until now, “no one has ever organized an exhibition focusing solely on his sporting images”—even though many critics have long recognized them as a major statement about the American spirit.

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These days, though, most art historians seem less interested in what these paintings say about America than what they might tell us about the man who created them, said Avis Berman in ARTnews. Works like Swimming, which boldly celebrates the naked male body, have led to “debates over masculinity and sexual tension in his life and career.” Here, such paintings are displayed alongside nude photographs that Eakins took of himself and his young students, which record “his intimacy with his male pupils.” Whatever the motivation behind these exercises, Eakins’ methods helped him to create nudes with a primal quality rarely seen in art. Wrestlers, which shows one naked man pinning another to the ground, “would have been at odds with the more genteel subjects” popular at the time. Indeed, some see the canvas itself as a sort of “symbolic self-portrait that reveals the artist’s manifold struggles.”