Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate

FROM HIS earliest years Eakins had been drawn to music, the most fleeting and intangible of experiences. Throughout a career that brought him perhaps more than his share of public affronts...

The campaign to neutralize and Americanize aestheticism extended beyond prescriptions for wholesomeness and manly discipline in art. Those seeking normalization also undertook to restructure the very concept of artistic vision. At the core of this enterprise was the remodeling of “morbid” egotism into healthy and specialized subjectivity. This newly legitimized subjectivity in turn helped create a dynamic role for art as a form of therapy couched in a purely visual language, acting directly on …