When the Louvre museum calls looking to hang one of your works, it’s the art world equivalent of a Broadway debut – and an offer no one could refuse.
So when Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum got the call – would it lend Thomas Eakins’ work “Swimming” to the venerable Paris museum for inclusion in its current exhibition, “American Artists and the Louvre”? – it earned the right to swagger a bit as only the second Fort Worth art museum ever to display a painting in the world’s premier citadel of fine art. (In 1989, Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum sent Jacques-Louis David’s “The Anger of Achilles” Paris-bound.)
“I think it is such a great honor,” says Ruth Carter Stevenson, president of the Carter’s board of trustees. “After all, it’s not every week that someone from Fort Worth gets a painting in the Louvre, so I think it puts us in a really nice spot.”
Sweetening the experience even more is word from Paris that “Swimming” is one of the exhibit’s showstoppers.
“Oh, quite right, the Eakins is truly one of the great and popular masterpieces of the entire exhibition,” confirms Olivier Meslay, curator of the Louvre’s painting department, and a specialist in British, American and Spanish works.
Eakins’ 1885 oil on canvas – which depicts a group of men (Eakins and his students) enjoying a painterly skinny-dip – is among 27 American works to complete the Louvre’s current show, which concentrates on those American artists who either exhibited or sought inspiration at the museum. The exhibit’s painters run the gamut from Benjamin West, Rembrandt Peale and Winslow Homer to Mary Cassatt, Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper.
“Swimming’s” Louvre engagement is clearly the crowning moment for a work that was once formally removed from the permanent collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Also known as “The Swimming Hole” and “The Old Swimming Hole,” the painting was purchased in 1925 by the Fort Worth Art Association, which eventually became the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. When the Modern decided in 1972 to make a change in its mandate as an arts institution – to shift its concentration to post-war contemporary and modern art – it caused a minor stir among Fort Worth art mavens when they learned that “Swimming” would not figure in the museum’s new mission. What most locals didn’t know was that the Modern had put into motion a plan to sell the work to the Carter, which paid an estimated $10 million for it in 1990.
The painting’s depiction of male nudity – called “graphic realism” by the Carter – always has tinged the work as slightly prurient and flouting Victorian sensibilities.
Several years ago, as both the Chicago-based Terra Foundation for American Art and the Louvre were coordinating the current exhibition, they became determined to have “Swimming.” So in January 2005, Terra approached the Amon Carter about making a rare loan of the Eakins.
“They told me that they saw ‘Swimming’ as the key work of this exhibition,” recalls Rebecca Lawton, the Carter’s curator of paintings and sculpture. “By virtue of being selected to show at the Louvre, and now being so warmly received, ‘Swimming’ has solidified itself as an international masterpiece.” According to the Louvre’s Meslay, there is no one thing that explains “Swimming’s” rapturous reception in Paris.
“The public finds very appealing that this Eakins clearly echoes some antique sculptures and other paintings already in the Louvre,” he says. “Also, the public seems to be fascinated by Eakins’ depiction of the male nude – but not in some anatomical, academic or dry historical way, but rather as part of his real, open-air life view of young people swimming.”
Once the Louvre’s show ends Sept. 18, the Carter will dispatch Lawton to accompany “Swimming” back to familiar waters, in one of the Amon Carter’s marquee galleries.
