Taking Lessons From a Bloody Masterpiece - The New York Times

I’ve become obsessed with Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic.” Let me show you why.

Maybe you’ve felt what I’ve felt lately: a certain skepticism of the idea of art as a source of solace. But who said art should be an escape, a comfort, a barbiturate? Art’s tougher and mightier than that — and for some of the greatest painters of the past, the stuff of art resided in the gory mess of real life. These last two months I’ve grown obsessed with one American painting: a bloody masterpiece of pain and healing, made in Philadelphia nearly a century and a half ago. Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was still a young artist when he completed “The Gross Clinic,” an in-action, up-to-the-minute

saved by

• Ashwin Reddy

related reading

• Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazinethepointmag.com
• The Coach in the Operating Room | The New Yorkernewyorker.com
• The Painted Protest, by Dean Kissickharpers.org
• Look at yourself objectively (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)aaronsw.com
• Cy Twombly, the Content Painter | The New Yorkernewyorker.com
• Your Book Review: Great And Desperate Curesastralcodexten.com
• On the compulsion to make arthenrikkarlsson.xyz
• The Picture of Dorian Gray | Project Gutenberggutenberg.org
• Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?newyorker.com
• Edvard Munch Was More Than ‘The Scream’ - The Atlantictheatlantic.com
• Love in the Time of Numbness; or, Doctor Chekhov, Writer | The New Yorkernewyorker.com
• Atul Gawande: Curiosity and What Equality Really Means | The New Yorkernewyorker.com