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I liked the picture, Ironworkers, being working class I know this is not the way looked

or rather my forebearers. My mother worked in a fish factory she had an hour off for lunch

and hurried home to set potatoes to boil, and when they did, she turned off the gas and wrapped the casserole so the potatoes were ready in the evening, she had a hard life

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Steelworkers at Noon comes across to this boomer as soft homo-erotica w/ a muted suggestion of after-hours pedophilia. I think that subtext is what offended an earlier sensibility, not its vaunted muck-raking effrontery.

The inversion of knowledge-seeking in our age of Judeo-Babylonian captivity is sad but evident. From lowest to highest ranks, jobless to millionaire. Has there ever been a more cowardly, pitiful society? Not in America I think. That's why I'm not repelled by Bo Bartlett's apparently satirical pick-up truck Americana: still a glimmer of red-neck defiance and devotion.

I'm happy w/ the self-sequestering of artists' overtly homosexual memes. My grand scheme for civic engineering of art would be main street (G and PG) side street (R) back street (X). Your closet will not be raided unless you transgress.

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Hi Billy Thistle,

The Met, "In January 1886, Thomas Eakins removed the loincloth from a male model while lecturing about the pelvis to an anatomy class that included female students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Angry protests by parents and students soon forced him to resign from the Academy at the request of the board. Following Eakins' departure, however, thirty-eight of his male students resigned from the Academy and formed the Art Students' League of Philadelphia, providing him with a new forum for his life classes and for the creation of many of the paintings and photographs of the 1880s, including this nude study of Bill Duckett, an amateur athlete. The relaxed atmosphere of the Art Students' League, where Eakins and his students governed themselves, permitted greater freedom in the photography of models than had prevailed at the Pennsylvania Academy."

Among those who pushed for Eakins' removal was his protegé, Thomas Anshultz! Anshultz then replaced Eakins as director of painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Linh

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Not sure what your point is. Please say more.

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If Anshultz was gay or sort of gay, he freaked out over a nude male model.

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Wiki's rendition of the incident offers more background detail.

Anshutz participated in Eakins's The Naked Series, photographing nude models in seven pre-defined standing poses. He modeled for Eakins himself, along with colleagues such as J. Laurie Wallace and Covington Few Seiss, who would pose outdoors nude, often wrestling, swimming and boxing. Eadweard Muybridge eventually made his way to Philadelphia and Anshutz and Eakins helped build Muybridge's zoopraxiscope.

Loincloth incident

Eakins was forced to resign from the academy in an 1886 scandal that was sparked by his use of a fully nude male model in front of either an all-female or a mixed-male-and-female class. Anshutz did not defend his mentor; he co-signed a letter to the Philadelphia Sketch Club: "We hereby charge Mr. Thoms Eakins with conduct unworthy of a gentleman & discreditable to this organization & ask his expulsion from the club." Anshutz was promoted to Eakins's position at the academy.

So Anshutz was already part of the au naturel club. He may have been covering his own ass, establishing his conservative bona fides by turning on Eakins.

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I learned a great deal from this content, and am grateful for it. That any one person can be so globally peripatetic and astoundingly eclectic, in such depth and detail, deeply impresses me. I think you remember more than this reader will ever know to forget. Thank you.

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"You will see great art and you will shit on it"

- Cabaret Voltaire

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Nice, wide-ranging retrospective, Linh. Good stuff, except for this: "Who cares, though, what outsiders think, least of all some sweating bum in Vung Tau with his coconut?" Knock that shit off, Linh! WE care. As for homosexuality, we all know that many have created, built and advanced much in various civilizations (Alan Turning in particular comes to mind). But then so have alcoholics, autists and drug addicts. Circumspection, as with Grant Wood, is a feature, not a bug.

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did you forget andrew wyeth?

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Hi Hansruedi,

I find Wyeth as an illustrator less interesting than Norman Rockwell!

Linh

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