On Art
RAYNOR, VIVIEN
On Art YANKEE MACHISMO BY VIVIEN RAYNOR M any of the 180-odd oils and watercolors by Winslow Homer must be old friends to most visitors of the current exhibition of his work at the Whitney...
...The results of his stay in England fall into this category, yet they have redeeming features...
...Almost as much time and talent seems to have been devoted to that battle as to producing work, and it forced U.S...
...This may also explain why he was such a late developer...
...These reddish-brown works give way to rural scenes in which clothes and landscape are handled with more assurance than bodies, but the color, if still low-key, becomes fresher...
...Maturer faculties have a hard time appraising a blood-spattered sea swarming with sharks, the black seaman lashed to a foundering boat as a tornado bears down from the horizon...
...Like many Yankee painters, Homer began as an illustrator and was a very successful one too...
...This causes one to reflect again on Miss Ashton's description of the difficulties faced by America's native artists...
...by the Barbizon school, the plein air prelude to Impressionism, and the English watercolorists...
...As Lloyd Goodrich points out in his introduction to the catalogue for the show, the small, relatively intimate early paintings are extraordinary for having been done at a time when panoramas were the rage...
...Stuart Davis, on the other hand, maintained that Homer's style "was no style at all, but the method of a man who has seen photographic illustration and liked it," an estimation bluff and homespun enough to satisfy the artist himself...
...His major work dates from this period and consists of landscapes with and without figures...
...He was obviously moved by the austere life of northern fishermen and the women who processed their catch...
...However suspicious one may be of Homer's red-blooded individualism, there is plenty to admire in the exhibition, from the post-French period on...
...the men...
...nor did he bring with him any mystical preconceptions...
...Despite his protestations, it does look as though he was affected, if only out of the corner of his eye...
...Equally curious was his trip to England, in 1881, a few years after taking up water-colors...
...In the Mountains (1877...
...They are lonely but not hermetic, for his ecstasy in nature was both clearheaded and in-controvertibly masculine...
...XT " JLOMERS famous oil...
...Homer, of course, made quite an issue of not being influenced: "If a man wants to be an artist, he should never never look at pictures...
...Trained as a lithographer's apprentice in Boston, where he was born in 1936, by age 23 he had become a popular contributor to Harper's Weekly and other magazines...
...These last studies of black fishermen show Homer to be extraordinary in modern times for his unselfconscious handling of so fraught a subject...
...for example, is his first truly non-illustrative painting (he pursued both professions until 1875...
...As an artist, he could render a doe drinking in a Disneyesque pose with her body flopped across a log and forelegs submerged to the knees in water...
...whether real or imaginary, is not conducive to art, presumably because the whole activity is elitist...
...their clothes are broadly blocked areas of strong colors that stand out against the near-black sweep of a parallel mountain in back...
...Another inhibiting factor, which she doesn't mention, could very well be too literal an interpretation of masculinity, whereby the practice and appreciation of art becomes suspect, something best left to those of uncertain sex...
...The blame is usually placed on the sagging shoulders of the original Puritan small businessmen, but I'm not so sure the locker-room tradition hasn't played a larger role...
...whether hauling fish or bodies out of the foam, are like personae in some Classic tragedy...
...The Gulf Stream, an amazing aberration in an artist who made so much ol naturalism and working-on-the-spot, is also from this phase...
...Such things do happen, to be sure, but one still feels sympathetic toward the schoolteachers who asked his dealer for some background to this canvas...
...He chose a forbidding part of England to visit -the fishing port of Tynemouth in Northumberland-but felt no temptation, apparently, to embellish the drama of an endless struggle with angry seas...
...This thought occurs after reading Dore Ashton's The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, a new account of the battle to establish a national art in America...
...His early paintings feature reasonably efficient, if not too inspired, studies of bivouacked soldiers, derived from his coverage of the Civil War for Harper's...
...In contrast to the northern elegies are the famous tropical watercolors...
...and the light is hitting them and the gray foreground contour they are poised on...
...Worth noting are Cape Trinity, Saguenay River, an extraordinary, virtually black-and-white picture of a bulbous cliff overhanging the water, with a moon illuminating low-flying clouds...
...He was scarcely the intellectual Gauguin was...
...Upon his return from England in 1883...
...and another monochromatic canvas accurately titled Artist's Studio in an Afternoon Fog, a misty shape seen across a sharp band of dark rocks and light water...
...From his stiff beginnings as a figure painter, his blacks invariably have more character— and are better executed-than his whites...
...On Art YANKEE MACHISMO BY VIVIEN RAYNOR M any of the 180-odd oils and watercolors by Winslow Homer must be old friends to most visitors of the current exhibition of his work at the Whitney (through June 24...
...I think Rowing Homeward (1890) is the finest example here...
...There are the usual rumors of an unhappy love affair, not as yet substantiated...
...as it often has been...
...Her sociopolitical perspective leaves one to conclude that egalitarianism...
...Watercolor was undoubtedly his medium, as he himself thought, and though the late Bahama pieces are the most admired...
...Splendid as his technique had become, I believe the prettiness of the subject made it too bland for his sensibility...
...Indeed, more than Americana, it is an example of American-ness in art...
...The white light of these latitudes, the bright blue seas and the palms -vegetation that is hopelessly picturesque even in reality-do not appear suited to his temperament...
...artists-especially during the last 30 years-to take positions ranging from the bombastic to the escapist...
...quite as impartially he could paint A Good Shot, where the victim, a stag, is lurching in death on a boulder...
...On the other hand, the location gave him a chance to paint black people again, and he had not done this since the '70s...
...Like Hemingway, Homer extracted art from the male principle, less of a feat in a time when Caucasian machismo had more practical outlets...
...His studies in painting were short-lived, but his blunt self-confidence made up for what he lacked in schooling, enabling him to go out into the countryside and teach himself...
...It is a very rapid sketch of men pulling across a calm yellowish sea, with the sun setting into a bank of purple-to-slate clouds...
...Homer was an outdoors man, equal to any natural occasion...
...The oils of the '90s are often im-pastoed, and a certain coarseness of handling prefigures the excesses of some of the next generation's painters...
...With a pale, cloudy sky behind, the composition forms three shapes arcing across the canvas, their thrust opposed by the figures and sticks tilting up toward the mountain top...
...Homer retired to live alone in Maine where, except for winter trips south, he remained until his death in 1910...
...All the same, Homer's art looked pretty American even a century ago...
...At other times Homer's crude-ness works to create a severity that foreshadows Marsden Hartley...
...In the meantime...
...But the show, which will proceed to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and thence to the Art Institute of Chicago, is far from a mere exercise in nostalgia...
...For that the Greeks and, who knows, maybe the aboriginal Americans could take a share of the responsibility...
...You can tell these ladies," wrote Homer, ever the wise guy, "that the unfortunate negro, who is now so dazed & parboiled, will be rescued & returned to his friends & home, & ever after live happily...
...Because it is more of an icon now than a picture, the work quite possibly is beyond critical discussion, especially if one first saw it during the impressionable years...
...Homer continued to produce figures in landscape that, while not sentimental, are either anecdotal or just do not get off the ground as paintings...
...Homer's lifelong intransigence— the one personality trait of his that appears to be known-makes one wonder why, in 1866, he chose to visit France of all places (he is said to have remarked later of Impressionism that his grandmother could knit better pictures...
...They need not have worried really, for as Homer shows, American art has long lacked the female virtues that should also be part of the male province...
...Now, with the acceptance of Abstract Expressionism and its offspring, peace reigns, leading one to suppose art acquires a national identity only when it eclipses that of other cultures...
...in fact, they are much closer to the spirit of Mark Twain than that of Manifest Destiny...
...Such bold painterliness does not occur again in the oils until the final Maine period...
...His hefty fishwives with baskets and nets have a weird Victorian monumentality...
...Homer's illustrating experience provided some technical framework -the pictorial values of black-and-white composition-as well as subject matter...
...The boisterous, hard-drinking, hard-wenching image projected by the Abstract Expressionists suggests that as recently as the 1950s they felt a need to reassure both themselves and their public...
...Japanese in its simplicity, it is little more than a few dark strokes on thin wash...
...Clearly a closet romantic, he seldom, if ever, expressed sensuality either through form, color or texture (Goodrich goes so far as to comment on the asexuality of Homer's work...
...It consists of four small female figures, hatted, gloved and carrying staves, pausing on their way up a slope...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 11
