The Wrestlers

In 1899 Thomas Eakins painted two wrestlers in Philadelphia, a hold studied as calmly as a model posed in a studio. Six years later George Luks, who had also trained in Philadelphia and was by then living in New York, took up the same subject and did almost everything the other way. Eakins built his bodies with smooth, blended strokes learned in Paris. Luks lays the paint on thick and fast. He puts us right at the edge of the mat, so close that the man underneath, pinned upside down, has his face turned toward us. The bodies are lit hard against a dark ground, and the museum compares that light to a press photographer's flash, something Luks knew well from his years drawing for newspapers. The same curators see in the wrestler at the left, with his furrowed brow and flushed face, a cousin of the ghoulish heads in Goya's Black Paintings. Luks signed it at the lower right, George Luks 1905, and the New York dealers Kraushaar Galleries sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1945.