Henry Adams is Chair of the Department of Art History at Case Western Reserve University. An award-winning art historian, he is the author of more than 200 publications on American art, including books, exhibition catalogues, and scholarly and popular articles. He collaborated with Ken Burns on a PBS documentary about the painter Thomas Hart Benton.
"The most extraordinary biography I have ever read on an
artist."--Andrew Wyeth
"At last a biography that brings fully to life the creator of
American art's most astonishing works. Until this point the Thomas
Eakins iconography has been staid and housebroken. Henry Adams'
book breaks from that tradition brilliantly."--Jamie Wyeth
"With a wealth of fresh documentation and the page-turning momentum
of a detective story, Henry Adams has uncovered the Gothic world of
Eakins's private and public biography, a scandalous mixture of
insanity, incest, suicide, and exhibitionism. But more important,
he has woven this sinister story into new and deeper readings of
Eakins's work, creating a seamless interpretation of how life is
transformed into art."--Robert Rosenblum
"Adams has probed more deeply than anyone thus far. One need not
agree with all his conclusions to recognize that he has made Eakins
a far more provocative and compelling artist than we knew
before.... This new biography of Eakins may impact our
understanding of the artist the way Fawn Brodie's biography of
Thomas Jefferson changed our view of the author of the Declaration
of Independence. It's no longer possible to see Eakins as a simple
American hero or to
ignore the dark shadows that shaped his life."--Bonnie Barrett
Stretch, ArtNews
"Cogent, exhaustive, and daring...a galvanizing work inspired by
Adams' immersion in a long-lost, still little-studied cache of
Eakins' papers.... Adams' meticulous, frequently audacious
arguments and bold...psychological interpretations of Eakins'
arresting and enigmatic paintings and photographs are as well
crafted as they are incendiary, and this no-holds-barred
deconstruction of an American icon will both outrage and intrigue
readers as it sparks debate not
only about Eakins but also about the symbiosis between art and
life."--Booklist
"Written as compellingly as a novel, Eakins Revealed is a portrait
of one of America's most important artists, warts and all. Yet, it
avoids sensationalism, preferring instead to put Eakins into the
kind of cultural and artistic contexts that deepen our
understanding of him without excusing his sometimes inexcusable
behavior. What Adams does in this compelling biography is introduce
us to Eakins the man, whose sometimes disturbing behavior informed
and
inspired Eakins the artist."--Indianapolis Star
"Adams...has reexamined the evidence of the artist's life and art
and found a hidden world of insanity, incest, suicide, and
exhibitionism. In Eakins Revealed, he challenges the work of nearly
every previous writer on Eakins.... All of this adds up to a
critical bull's eye for the author."--Joseph Phelan, The Washington
Times
"Adams has a fresh take that he works out with rigor and care. He
links evidence for sexual trauma in Eakins's childhood to evidence
of subsequent episodes of violence and sexual misconduct in a
manner that is neither prurient nor moralizing. He displays a great
affinity for, and astute observations of, the work itself, which
includes some of the most strikng American paintings of the late
19th and 20th centuries."--Publishers Weekly
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