Gordon Hendricks

Who is Gordon Hendricks?

Gordon Hendricks was an American art and film historian.

In 1961 Hendricks published the The Edison motion picture myth in which he showed that it was not Thomas Alva Edison who should be attributed with the invention of the first device for cinema screeningss, but in fact William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. In 1975 he authored a work, republished in 2001, about Eadweard Muybridge, in which he called Muybridge the father of the cinema.

Other than these works about film history, Hendricks also published books about the history of art. He wrote about Winslow Homer and Albert Bierstadt. Another of this themes, along with Muybridge was Thomas Eakins. Thus it was Hendricks who in his 1974 book about Eakins was the first to raise the question of Eakins' homosexuality.

After his death Hendricks bequeathed two major collections to the Archives of American Art: one about Thomas Eakins, the other about film history.