Muybridge Murder: Part II!
Part Two of our Two-Part Hit-Piece on Phillip Glass's 'The Photographer'!
Thomas Eakins, Thomas Eakins's Monkey Bobby on Cloth-Covered Bench, c. 1885, albumen print, 2 5/16 x 2 3/8 inches, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
This is part II of a story so convoluted, you will need to read part I first. I promise you, worth the trip here.
IV. With Method in the Madness.
At the office, Eadweard Muybridge was grasping for a new lexicon for a modern world.
At home, Muybridge had just the word for what vexed him: infidelity.
The problem was, again, photographic — namely, that a photo of Muybridge’s young son turned up with the name of another man — Harry Larkyns — written in his wife’s hand on the back. Acquaintances speculated that the baby looked more like Larkyns than Muybridge, and Muybridge had suspected shenanigans — but only now, with pictures to prove it, did he come to the belief that Larkyns was the father of Florado Helios Muybridge.
Muybridge went to Larkyns’ place. “I have a message for you from my wife,” he said, and delivered that message in lead, high speed to Larkyns’ torso. Larkyns died from his wounds, and Muybridge surrendered to law enforcement.
Muybridge’s benefactor, Leland Stanford — former California governor and racehorse-lover, as you’ll recall from last time — hired the killer a great lawyer, who presented a case of insanity. Remember the traumatic brain injury after being thrown from the horse? Remember the series of increasingly fanciful assumed identities including a sun deity before changing the spelling of the surname to “Eadweard”? Muybridge had a solid case, but he apparently cut its legs out by testifying to the jury that he intended to kill Larkyns because he believed Larkyns had fathered his wife’s child. A little on the nose, Eadweard, but oh well — the jury was forgiving, and while the insanity defense crumbled, the final verdict was justifiable homicide.
But Muybridge evidently wasn’t entirely right in the head, and soon bit the hand that fed. Stanford and Muybridge feuded over who should get credit for the idea of the trip-wire photographs — Stanford was by then accustomed to seeing his name on everything in the state of California, and Muybridge had an ego to match. Stanford cut Muybridge loose soon thereafter, and Muybridge had to look elsewhere to fund his further studies of animals in motion.
He went to Philadelphia, where he found common cause with Thomas Eakins.
V. Sit Down Monkey-Like.
Eakins saw little difference between the eye of science and the eye of the artist: nothing prurient about observing the nude body, he reasoned: whether on the mortuary slab or the model stand, the human body is fascinating. That’s one reason Muybridge succeeded where Eakins had stumbled: Muybridge kept it scientific. He marketed his photographic studies as science — not as home decoration, that might offend the genteel consciences of the fine art establishment of Philadelphia. Eakins didn’t see what the fuss was about, and he saw the camera as another tool in the arsenal of the fine artist:
“The big artist does not sit down monkey like & copy a coal scuttle or an ugly old woman like some Dutch painters have done nor a dungpile, but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature & steals her tools [sic.] He learns what she does with light the big tool & then color then form and appropriates them to his own use. Then he’s got a canoe of his own smaller than nature’s but big enough.”1
Eakins had a big enough canoe — he had painted his masterpiece, The Gross Clinic in 1875 and was completing The Swimming Hole — with the help of photographs he’d taken.
(And Eakins knew how monkeys work — he kept one as a pet, named Bobby, in the studio.)
So when the University of Pennsylvania’s provost invited Muybridge to work in Philadelphia, Eakins was eager to help, enlisting his protege Thomas Anschutz as well. Anschutz and Eakins set up cameras, posed nude for their own photographs, and made studies of Bobby, the monkey — but the fruit of Eakins’ side of the collaboration would remain outside of his artistic oeuvre during his lifetime. It was an aid to his photography, but not an exhibition-worthy product co-equal with an oil painting.
Still, the camera was solving the same problem: recording a truth that the human eye could see but not record. Eakins observed that in the life-painting classes he taught at the Pennsylvania Academy, a model would strike a fresh pose and slowly slouch before the students’ eyes. A model can only hold a pose for so long, so the painter that is faithful to observation is always going to depict a slouching, tired model. With a camera, he noted, you could get the gesture of a moment and return to it for reference — a slice of time that the painter could only gesture at.
It’s a subtler thing than Stanford’s horse-foot problem, but it’s essentially the same epistemology: there are facts of the matter that we have not yet found a visual language to transcribe.
VI. Harsh Realisms.
For Eakins’s part, he was shortly thereafter sacked from the Pennsylvania Academy for “conduct unworthy of a gentleman & discreditable to this organization” — probably an incident involving a wardrobe malfunction with a loincloth in a mixed-gender lecture, but certainly the nude photos of men didn’t help. Thomas Anschutz took Eakins’ job at PAFA; apparently unbothered by the role he had himself played, Anschutz signed an open letter demanding Eakins’ ouster.
Betrayer though he was, Anschutz nonetheless shepherded a crop of painters whose names will be familiar to recent readers of Hanging Papers — namely a young Robert Henri, just off the train from the West and himself running from conduct unworthy of a gentleman,2 and later other members of the Ash Can School.
Years later, Florado Helios Muybridge grew up to look an awful lot like Eadweard. Strange new language of truth, these photographs.
As for Phillip Glass — how well did his melodrama succeed?
It’s telling that the second version was shelved shortly after its debut, and it’s hard to find the script or any film of its performance. It alluded to the themes of objectivity and obscurity, and the critics seem to have agreed that in spite of using Muybridge’s photos and transcripts from the trial, obscurity won the day. The Washington Post’s Pamela Sommers, in a characteristic review, called The Photographer “uneven but always compelling work.”3 “Robert Coe's script seems merely a random compendium of riddles, maxims and quotations culled from historical texts.”
ArtForum’s Charles Hagan had a dimmer view:
“Despite occasional telling moments and striking images, though, the production as a whole is simply disjointed, an overblown mishmash of ideas and effects that never coheres into an experience larger than the sum of its parts.”4
Well, what of it? The truth of the life of Eadweard Muybridge is that murdering his wife’s lover was genuinely out of step with the work of a man that believed that he was finding a way to express objective truths — facts out there in the universe, not expressions of private rage. We may never know if Larkyns was Florado’s father, but it is either so or not. There is a fact of the matter, and a bullet cannot put a mystery to rest.
To that end, Glass’s best remark on Muybridge was probably that, apart from the facts, there’s very little we know.
Thanks for reading. Join us next week for an even darker dive down the true-crime rabbit-hole as we consider the role of the American Surrealists in the Black Dahlia Murder — trigger warning in advance: we will discuss a grisly crime scene and indulge the speculations of some deeply questionable source, but if you have any James Ellroy paperbacks, now’s the time to tuck them in your beach bag, because we’re going there!
Gallery News:
Leonard Rosenfeld’s series of works meditating on nuts and bolts will be exhibited at Patch & Remington in Marcellus, Michigan this September 11. Rosenfeld’s train drawings of the late 1950s will be on view this September at Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art’s booth at the Art on Paper fair, (Sept. 8 - 11).
Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art will shine a spotlight on four Art Students League students — along with the rest of our stable of emerging and mid-career artists — at this fall’s Affordable Art Fair (Sept. 22 - 25) in New York.
New works on paper by Marissa Paternoster will be available this September at Art on Paper fair and the Affordable Art Fair. Check out our news page or drop us a note for more details, and we hope to see you there!
As quoted by Susan Danly and Cheryl Leibold in Eakins and the Photograph, Smithsonian, Washington D.C., 1994, p. 105.
Pamela Sommers, “'The Photographer,’” Washington Post, March 12, 1984.
Charles Hagan, ArtForum, December, 1983 “‘The Photographer/Far From the Truth,’ Brooklyn Academy of Music,’” pp. 77-78.