Yet there is no mistaking it. This giant work of art - more than twice the size of the original, now jointly owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts - takes off from The Gross Clinic. Students have replicated, if that's the word, Eakins' imagery and composition, and blown it up into modern space.
"It's more about the feeling of the composition," said painter Logan Grider, an assistant professor of art at the college, and the man who assigned his studio-art freshmen the seemingly impossible task of rendering the Eakins masterpiece in 3-D.
In cardboard. With hot glue.
The students even had homework: Photocopying their own faces multiple times and then pasting together cutout parts to form Gross images.
The whole thing took about two weeks to model and assemble, different classes working on the same project in the morning and in the afternoon. Sometimes work done at 11 a.m. would be dismantled and reworked at 3 p.m. And vice versa.
"They moved my head!" said Temple Price, a 19-year-old from Birmingham, Ala. Price had fashioned the head of Eakins, who painted himself into the background of the original. But someone in another class had switched heads. Price looked up at his shrunken Eakins, now oddly deformed, as if shriveled by jungle voodoo.
"It's tiny," he said, "and my head was enormous. They ripped my hand off too. But I think I kept it civil."
Grider's classes benefited from studying the Eakins work in Michael W. Cothren's art history class and from being able to see the actual painting, currently on view at the academy. Mark S. Tucker, senior conservator of paintings and vice chair of conservation at the Art Museum, also visited the class and discussed his work on the painting.
