I Saw the Light

Alice Walton's failed attempt last year to buy The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins' 1875 canvas of an operation being performed by a Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross, led me recently to pick up Portrait, the brisk new biography of Eakins by William S. McFeeley, and to take a new look at Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, Eakins' hard lined, sunstruck scene of himself (in the background) and his friend Schmitt, boating on the Schuykill River that runs through Philly, a picture owned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

You sometimes hear The Gross Clinic described as the greatest 19th century American painting, though I've never been sure what that meant, and for all its pictorial thunder I prefer the sculling picture. I know why, too. It's that hard light that searches out all the particulates of the scene and specifies everything it falls across. That light always seemed to me to be the visual correlative of the pragmatic, dry eyed materialist side of the American disposition, all of which can be virtues at times, and all of which are indisputably qualities of Eakins, who was fascinated by science, mechanism and rigorous processes. He painted the picture more than 50 years before William Carlos Williams offered his famous description of his own processes as a poet — "No ideas but in things" — but that's a line Eakins would have understood right away.

I found myself thinking about this at a press luncheon yesterday that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts gave to kick off the big Edward Hopper retrospective that opens there in May. As I watched the Hoppers slide by on a big screen at the front of the room I was reminded again how much Hopper's stark, unpitying light, all those sunstruck walls, owes to Eakins.

No one is better than Hopper at finding the melancholy note in sunlight. He understood how light can isolate figures even more mercilessly than darkness, a lesson I suspect he learned partly from Eakins. (Naturally they both suffered from serious bouts of depression.) And like Eakins he found in light its capability to imply deep, enclosing silence.

And where, I asked myself, did this light go later in American art? The light that identifies things that are mute, specific, isolated, enclosed within themselves? Then it hit me.

Donald Judd. No?