Driskel Vintage Photography

Circle of Thomas Eakins Male Nudes at the Site of “Swimming” - 1884 gelatin silver print

Driskel Vintage Photography

Driskel Vintage Photography
July 26-August 7, 2002
Opening Reception: Friday, July 26, 7-10 p.m.

 

Driskel Vintage Photography at the Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design in Provincetown , Massachusetts presents a group of photographic studies by the great American painter Thomas Eakins and his circle.This show runs concurrently with the magnificent Eakins exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York which traveled there from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

These small silver prints from the original negatives were produced recently in limited editions jointly under the auspices of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art . They show Eakins’s experiments in multiple-image photography during a period of his collaboration with Eadweard Muybridge and experiments with his version of the Marey-wheel camera. Also seen are his nude studies of friends and students, and indeed himself. In a photographic study of nude males at a swimming hole we get to observe one step in the process of the production of one of his masterpieces. The extent of his use of photography as a preparatory medium and a working tool is only now being fully understood.

The Eakins retrospective in New York is replete with a full component of the photographs. They are wisely woven into the exhibit as they relate to Eakins’s paintings, creating a presentation in depth that helps us to understand more fully his intense drive for realism. Eakins was an artist full of contradiction. The most radical art professor of his time in America, he transformed the curriculum of the Pennsylvania Academy to one centered on the study of the nude and anatomical studies, and in doing so revolutionized American art education. His radical changes, however, were based on the conservative and intensive studies at the atelier of Jean Leon Gerome, his master at the Ecole des Beaux-Artes in Paris.

An aesthetic conservative at heart, Eakins was so uncompromising in his quest for fidelity to his vision and his dedication to the nude that he embarrassed conservatives and confounded progressives. Now that the avant-gardism of the 20th century has waned and photography is fully accepted as a creditable medium on a par with painting and sculpture, we realize something about this artist. Eakins as a photographer, did, in fact, produce more great work with his grand subject, the nude, than we have previously understood.

The Schoolhouse Center is located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown's historic East End Gallery District. The Galleries are open daily from 11 and always by appointment. For more information please call Larry Collins at (508) 487.4800.