The most moving objects in the current exhibition of Winslow Homer’s work are not the paintings at all, but a pair of banged-up paint boxes in a display case. They seem to have soaked up considerable love. Homer never succeeded in getting a wife, though apparently he was in love at least once. Paint boxes were his companions. His fierce devotion to his paints and his craft fills the exhibition like a bracing breeze and seems to inspire everyone who passes through, no matter how casual his interest in the pictures.
The exhibition opened in Washington in October and is now at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, before it moves to New York’s Metropolitan Museum June 20. It’s a wonderful show, and if you wade in with the sporting vigor Homer demands — no dawdling in the shallow water — it is impossible not to hear this great 19th-century artist pass judgment on today’s art world.
Homer was the artist of the pure joy — it goes beyond joy, really — of seeing. Other painters lusted after brilliant design or drawing or color, tried to convey the emotional substance of a scene or the character of a model or the solid thingness of the universe. Homer’s mission was to get down on canvas the joy he felt seeing that girl dawdle alone, lost in thought, up that wooden ramp in the middle distance with the sun at her back. The orange- red of her blouse, wildflowers in the soft grass, a warm brown carpet of pine needles. To make interesting paintings he needed, more than any of his major contemporaries, to see interesting things. Van Gogh painted worn chairs and old shoes; he could have done a bravura portrait of a blank wall. Degas would draw a dozen tiny variations on one position of one model. But Homer needed to visit the front during the Civil War, the South during Reconstruction, Ten Pound Island in Gloucester Harbor, Key West, Cuba, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Adirondacks.
In his mid-forties he sailed off to Liverpool and settled in the little North Sea village of Cullercoats for a year and a half. Someone asked him (not unreasonably) what on earth for. “Atmosphere and color,” he explained. ” Look at the fisher-girls … There are none like them in my country.” At length he moved to the Maine coast and devoted himself to getting the ocean down on canvas. He threw himself at that problem again and again like waves slamming rocks, but it defeated him.
His obsession with the thrill of seeing underlies his greatest weakness. He trained as an illustrator; had a master illustrator’s eye for detail. He did best when he suppressed it. The girl on the ramp (The Morning Bell of 1871) is the paradigm early Homer. Warm yellow-greens and orange-reds, long low cinemascope canvases, and middle-distance figures dominate his early art. In this painting the recipe cooks up beautifully. Where it fails, it is because he has allowed the strength of his drawing to be sapped by fussy detail. Thus Milking Time (1875): a powerful composition centering on three heavy slats of a cattle enclosure. A boy seen from behind peers at the cows beyond. His mother stands beside him, dead center of the picture, with a bucket and milking stool. Degas would have outlined the figures, merely sketched in their accouterments, and allowed us to revel in the force of the drawing (not that Degas would have been caught dead in a barnyard). Homer needs to tell us about the woman’s two-toned sash, each fold of her dress, the tacks in the stool’s seat, the two rivets that fasten the bucket handle. So instead of creating an authoritative work, a masterful work, he achieves only charm.
He understood this weakness and fought against it, painting out details and seeking purity. Again and again he struggles to simplify. Sometimes he succeeds — strips his figures to the bare outline, unleashes the power of his drawing, and leaves us in awe. In The West Wind (1891), we see from behind a woman on a sandbank silhouetted against luminous ripping surf. A huge gray-lavender cloud presses downward. Driven sand roars upward. The wild brushstrokes leap and crackle, and the painting nearly shudders with force. But here, too, he overdoes it. The late ocean pictures are over-painted, under-drawn; in a way, too simple. Northeaster (1895) is a paragon of austerity: rocks, sky, and sea. Originally two men stood on shore. He painted them out. But this ocean is overwrought in the manner of the hammered-copper doodads you pick up at random souvenir stands worldwide. Homer kept worrying the surface with brushstrokes, one ping after another. The colors don’t shine, the foam doesn’t breathe or glisten or tremble, and, worst of all, there is nothing for the eye to come to grips with, just a slick swell of ocean to roll off. The thing he is trying to paint is unpaintable. What haunts us in the end is not what these pictures show, but what they fail to show.
Yet his best paintings are lyric masterpieces. In oils he has a fine, big technique, not a dazzling one. He is Rudolf Serkin, not Horowitz; he has freshness, dignity, intelligence, depth. His technique in watercolors is overwhelming. In his An October Day (1889), a hunted deer swims a blue lake, disturbing the reflections of fall foliage. The colors of autumn are warm, ordinarily, but these particular rusts and yellow-greens are chilly, in defiance of logic and color wheels; he has painted the air itself. A casual, perfect blotch of blue-green to make a pine onshore. A blotchier blotch for its reflection. Rendering the mirror surface of smooth water is the oldest painterly trick in the book, but Homer makes it mesmerizing. The deer in the cold water, the canoe and its reflection in two quick parallel strokes, the pale blues and gray-yellows that give off light — they leave you with the sensation of seeing (as Wordsworth says) into the life of things.
Homer’s paintings are mainly about America. Much of today’s American art is about America, too, and the contrast is striking. It is not merely that Homer is patriotic. His view of the country has a nuanced richness that makes the monotonous conformity of present-day artists seem ridiculous.
Almost as striking is the cultural environment in which he worked. Though critical opinion acknowledged Homer’s importance from his career’s outset, critics loved some of his paintings and hated others. Occasionally they praised and blasted different aspects of one picture. Some of their complaints hold up, many don’t, but on the whole these writers were balanced and intelligent.
Our contemporary critics, by contrast, have instituted a neo-Soviet policy of empty hucksterism. “You can see from the academies, from any exhibition, any review in the art magazines how art is received,” says Gerhard Richter (who has turned out some of the best of present-day abstract paintings snarling flocks of trapped bubbles in mud-orange glass with blue flashes, among other things); “It is accepted uncritically, and the attitude is ‘get on with it, anything you do is interesting.'”
Homer loved his country intelligently and sometimes cantankerously. His Union sentiments are never in doubt, but the Civil War scenes with which he starts his career are striking for hard-eyed realism (“No sentimentality,” said Harper’s Weekly). His peacetime views are wry sometimes, or ironic; Artists Sketching in the White Mountains (1868) shows a small pile-up of painters (Homer included) at a scenic spot. Over the course of decades, he paints Adirondack forests devastated by indiscriminate logging — pictures intended, vidently, to shore up the rising conservationist sentiment of the day. Boys fish a rippling waterlilied pond with a barren field of stumps stretched out behind; oblivious woodsmen lean comfortably on their axes in wasted fields, rest their bags on broken trees. Homer and many others abominated a favorite Adirondack hunting practice: I)ogs would drive deer into the water, where they were effortlessly shot, drowned, or clubbed by sportsmen in boats. Homer held up that kind of sport for inspection in a series of beautiful and chilling pictures, of which An October Day is one.
But in everything he paints, his love of America and (on the whole) her people is the ground on which all the rest is superimposed. His celebrated Breezing Up (1876) — a man and three boys in a catboat on a brilliant windy day — picks up the ebullient hopefulness of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Originally he’d painted the man holding the tiller, but he changed his mind and put a boy in charge — “whose bright eye [the New York Times wrote at the time] evidently sees such enormous horizons.”
What Homer with his ambivalence and thoughtful irony brings home is not so much the hatred large parts of today’s art community feel for this country but the sneering and unmodulated tone of the hatred. A painting by Frank Moore called Freedom to Share in the 1993 Whitney Biennial is a parody of Norman Rockwell’s famous Thanksgiving illustration, Freedom from Want. In Moore’s version, whites, blacks, and Asians mingle round the table as a (white) mother presents a parsley-decorated platter heaped up with drugs and syringes in the general shape of a turkey. “Like race, issues of gender and class and the critique of dominant culture inform much contemporary art practice,” writes one perceptive critic in the 1993 Biennial catalog. “The first post-cold war Biennial,” according to another, “inhabits a contradictory and unpredictablespace, ruled by the hegemonic structures of a heretofore repressive power, uncertain of what is to come.”
The America of the Biennial is vapid and barren next to Homer’s, with all the sophistication of a kindergarten but none of the variety. Contemplate two pictures from the start and finish of Homer’s career. In The Veteran in a New Field (1865), the returned soldier works with his back to us, scything wheat. A taut picture in three parallel strips: upper band of sky, then the swish and sparkle of wheat with the reaper picked out against it, and a band of stubble at the bottom. Nicolai Cikovsky shows in a fascinating catalog essay how Homer reworked the scythe by painting out the multi-blade model farmers actually used in order to substitute a traditional single-blade sickle. Why? To make a symbolic point: The nation’s returning heroes were Breezh.Up (A Fair Whd) retired grim reapers, lately engaged in cutting down other men. To refer, also, to President Lincoln, so recently cut down. But the fraught undertone takes nothing away from the veteran’s peaceful dignity.
In The Gulf Stream (1899), a sailor lies wearily on a dismasted small boat in rough seas, squinting at a sea-ful of sharks with a stubborn set to his jaw that constitutes a low-key, unhistrionic kind of defiance. Imminent death is a central Homer topic, and it suffuses his Adirondack deer-hunting pictures. Back during the Civil War, he had painted scenes like Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg, in which a Rebel soldier parades his defiance on the ramparts of the Confederate camp and we see, as a smokepuff in the far distance, the Union rifle shot that will kill him. He paints this favorite theme without sentimentality. Indeed, his detachment can be unsettling. In The GulfStream he seems to be daring himself to lose his cool, and he lays the sharks on thick; but the painting keeps its balance. Like The Veteran in a New Field, it is a portrait of death and heroism. What distinguishes good national art from bad is not jingoism but nuance, depth.
Strange times: The same day I saw the Homer show at the National Gallery in Washington, I visited the celebrated Vermeer show — two exhibits I suspect no art lover will ever forget. Serious scholars organize stunning shows, write about them in lucid, memorable catalogs, and the huge crowds clamor for more. An outside observer might guess that art in this country has never been more popular or better served.
And then we turn to the “art community” itself — on campus, running the galleries, publishing the culture periodicals; the group in charge of today’s new art. Back at the Whitney, one celebrated work by Robert Gober from the 1995 Biennial consists of a bundle of newspapers featuring made-up stories. About what? Welfare cuts and environmental disasters, naturally.-
Of course there were bad artists and foolish critics in Homer’s age, too. Of course the Whitney Biennial is notorious for its dreadfulness. I don’t even want to claim that the Biennials are all bad: 1993’s had interesting pieces by the Spanish expatriate Francesc Torres; and last year’s included good abstractions by Harriet Korman and old master Cy Twombly. Mostly, however, it is the same tedious broken record about race, class, and “gender” we have been hearing for decades, varinations on the themes of self-hatred and contempt — contempt for beauty, for America, above all for art itself. And like New Yorkers amid the blare of their renegade car alarms, most Americans have long since tuned the contemporary art world out.
It’s bewildering — until you figure it out. They aren’t the “art community, ” we are — we Homer lovers and Vermeer connoisseurs. And we are ripe for a renaissance. We lack only the new institutions — the anti-establishment art magazines, culture reviews, brave uncomformist galleries, new art institutes, Salons des Refusgs — to support one. We need to rescue today’s good young artists from the corrupt and demeaning environment in which they are trapped, to re-create an art criticism that can tell good from bad, to make the obvious connection between a public hungry for art, waiting forever in the cold just to get a glimpse of Homer and Vermeer, and the new artists who are capable of feeding it. Basking in Homer is a fine way to spend the afternoon, but to honor the man truly we ought to keep American art alive.
David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale, is the author, most recently, of 1939.
