PAFA’s Lively Installation of “The Gross Clinic”

What are this foot and that hand doing beside Dr. Gross?
I now believe it’s a good thing, for more than financial reasons, that the Philadelphia Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are sharing ownership of Eakins‘ “The Gross Clinic.” That’s because of the thoroughly unconventional but provocatively engaging installation it has received at PAFA, where I viewed it yesterday, in advance of today’s public unveiling.
The installation at the Philadelphia Museum, which I also saw at the beginning of its time there, was standard-issue, serious art museum treatment (not that there’s anything wrong with that): It was nestled among the artist’s oil studies for the painting; his boxing picture, “Between Rounds;” his Schuylkill River scene, “The Pair-Oared Shell”; and a portrait of him by his wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins.
But because PAFA had such a close association with Eakins (who taught there until he was booted out for removing a loincloth from a male model in a women’s class), its juxtapositions are more quirky and personal, starting with the startling plaster casts of body parts that have been positioned on either side of the iconic masterpiece.
It seems oddly fitting that a painting that graphically depicts a surgical incision should be surrounded by Eakins’ macabre study aides {including those above) for art students trying to learn anatomy.
As the wall text tells us:
Eakins devised a method of casting dissected body parts in plaster to create a record of these investigations and to provide useful teaching tools. Eakins acquired his expertise in dissection while attending classes at Jefferson Medical College [prior owner of “The Gross Clinic”] in 1874.
Also on display in the large gallery with the newly acquired Eakins are PAFA’s other Eakinses, as well as its works by artists who reflected “the artistic legacy that Eakins left on the teaching methods of the Pennsylvania Academy.” These include Thomas Anshutz and Cecilia Beaux, both of whom had been his students and later became his fellow teachers.
Now if PAFA could only hire a new director and deputy director, to replace Derek Gillman and Kim Sajet.