Secrets and Lies: Gossip and Art's Histories

Abstract

Half the pleasure of reading Henry Adams's biography Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist lies in absorbing the weird but juicy bits of information that make for fun gossip. The Philadelphia artist dressed like a slob, drank a quart of milk a day, and threatened people occasionally with his revolver. His mother gave him an intestinal purge to cure him of outbursts of sentimental poetry in grammar school. He preferred sitting on the floor to sitting in a chair, and walked around the house in his underwear, even in the presence of company. Other information expands on the rumors and scandals that shaped the artist's career, and is more weighty and difficult to absorb. As we look at the development of Eakins's biography, and explore how generations of scholars have revised gossip on the artist, we learn at least as much about the practice of American art history about its needs and anxieties as we do about Eakins himself. Gossip the stories we tell and how they circulate often tells us more about the groups of people who produce it than it does about the subjects of the gossip itself. This insight is at the heart of the story that Gavin Butt tells in his study of discourse on sexuality and the artist, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963. This book tracks major shifts in the disciplinary narratives about the artist as a social type, via his reading of the gossip about New York artists such as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Larry Rivers gossip that (as is the case with Eakins) invariably centers on the artists' sexuality. Pulling together the full range of available material on Eakins (including stories suppressed but preserved in the papers of Lloyd Goodrich, one of the