Winslow Homer and Our Contemporaries
GELERNTER, DAVID
Art Winslow Homer and Our Contemporaries By David Gelernter 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...
...Rendering the mirror surface of smooth water is the oldest painterly trick in the book, but Homer makes it mesmerizing...
...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...
...He painted them out...
...he could have done a bravura portrait of a blank wall...
...A huge gray-lavender cloud presses downward...
...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...
...And like New Yorkers amid the blare of their renegade car alarms, most Americans have long since tuned the contemporary art world out...
...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...
...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...
...Driven sand roars upward...
...His view of the country has a nuanced richness that makes the monotonous conformity of present-day artists seem ridiculous...
...His mother stands beside him, dead center of the picture, with a bucket and milking stool...
...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...
...Much of today's American art is about America, too, and the contrast is striking...
...In The West Wind (1891), we see from behind a woman on a sandbank silhouetted against luminous ripping surf...
...In his An October Day (1889), a hunted deer swims a blue lake, disturbing the reflections of fall foliage...
...he has freshness, dignity, intelligence, depth...
...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...
...he has painted the air itself...
...The girl on the ramp (The Morning Bell of 1871) is the paradigm early Homer...
...His peacetime views are wry sometimes, or ironic...
...But this ocean is overwrought in the manner of the hammered-copper doodads you pick up at random souvenir stands worldwide...
...oblivious woodsmen lean comfortably on their axes in wasted fields, rest their bags on broken trees...
...Contemplate two pictures from the start and finish of Homer's career...
...Someone asked him (not unreasonably) what on earth for...
...They seem to have soaked up considerable love...
...Warm yellow-greens and orange-reds, long low cinemascope canvases, and middle-distance figures dominate his early art...
...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...
...A boy seen from behind peers at the cows beyond...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...His technique in watercolors is overwhelming...
...Imminent death is a central Homer topic, and it suffuses his Adirondack deer-hunting pictures...
...Sometimes he succeeds-strips his figures to the bare outline, unleashes the power of his drawing, and leaves us in awe...
...Art Winslow Homer and Our Contemporaries By David Gelernter 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...
...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...
...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...
...He is Rudolf Serkin, not Horowitz...
...Over the course of decades, he paints Adirondack forests devastated by indiscriminate logging-pictures intended, evidently, to shore up the rising conservationist sentiment of the day...
...In oils he has a fine, big technique, not a dazzling one...
...Of course the Whitney Biennial is notorious for its dreadfulness...
...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...
...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...
...Homer was the artist of the pure joy-it goes beyond joy, really-of seeing...
...Indeed, his detachment can be unsettling...
...Serious scholars organize stunning shows, write about them in lucid, memorable catalogs, and the huge crowds clamor for more...
...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, variations on the themes of self-hatred and contempt-contempt for beauty, for America, above all for art itself...
...Artists Sketching in the White Mountains (1868) shows a small pile-up of painters (Homer included) at a scenic spot...
...Occasionally they praised and blasted different aspects of one picture...
...At length he moved to the Maine coast and devoted himself to getting the ocean down on canvas...
...But the fraught undertone takes nothing away from the veteran's peaceful dignity...
...Like The Veteran in a New Field, it is a portrait of death and heroism...
...His obsession with the thrill of seeing underlies his greatest weakness...
...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...
...Homer and many others abominated a favorite Adirondack hunting practice: Dogs would drive deer into the water, where they were effortlessly shot, drowned, or clubbed by sportsmen in boats...
...The late ocean pictures are over-painted, under-drawn...
...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...
...It is not merely that Homer is patriotic...
...Basking in Homer is a fine way to spend the afternoon, but to honor the man truly we ought to keep American art alive...
...To make a symbolic point: The nation's returning heroes were retired grim reapers, lately engaged in cutting down other men...
...But here, too, he overdoes it...
...Back at the Whitney, one celebrated work by Robert Gober from the 1995 Biennial consists of a bundle of newspapers featuring made-up stories...
...Degas would draw a dozen tiny variations on one position of one model...
...In The Gulf Stream he seems to be daring himself to lose his cool, and he lays the sharks on thick...
...Welfare cuts and environmental disasters, naturally...
...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...
...Almost as striking is the cultural environment in which he worked...
...They aren't the "art community," we are-we Homer lovers and Vermeer connoisseurs...
...Though critical opinion acknowledged Homer's importance from his career's outset, critics loved some of his paintings and hated others...
...Homer's paintings are mainly about America...
...but the painting keeps its balance...
...He trained as an illustrator...
...In this painting the recipe cooks up beautifully...
...Thus Milking Time (1875): a powerful composition centering on three heavy slats of a cattle enclosure...
...The orange-red of her blouse, wildflowers in the soft grass, a warm brown carpet of pine needles...
...Atmosphere and color," he explained...
...A blotchier blotch for its reflection...
...Van Gogh painted worn chairs and old shoes...
...Some of their complaints hold up, many don't, but on the whole these writers were balanced and intelligent...
...Of course there were bad artists and foolish critics in Homer's age, too...
...The first post-cold war Biennial," according to another, "inhabits a contradictory and unpredictable space, ruled by the hegemonic structures of a heretofore repressive power, uncertain of what is to come...
...Homer never succeeded in getting a wife, though apparently he was in love at least once...
...It's bewildering-until you figure it out...
...Originally two men stood on shore...
...I don't even want to claim that the Biennials are all bad: 1993's had interesting pieces by the Spanish expatriate Francesc Torres...
...Paint boxes were his companions...
...To refer, also, to President Lincoln, so recently cut down...
...Boys fish a rippling waterlilied pond with a barren field of stumps stretched out behind...
...Look at the fisher-girls...
...And we are ripe for a renaissance...
...Our contemporary critics, by contrast, have instituted a neo-Soviet policy of empty hucksterism...
...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...
...There are none like them in my country...
...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...
...Where it fails, it is because he has allowed the strength of his drawing to be sapped by fussy detail...
...What distinguishes good national art from bad is not jingoism but nuance, depth...
...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...
...David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale, is the author, most recently, of 1939...
...He paints this favorite theme without sentimentality...
...Again and again he struggles to simplify...
...in a way, too simple...
...Northeaster (1895) is a paragon of austerity: rocks, sky, and sea...
...A casual, perfect blotch of blue-green to make a pine onshore...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...So instead of creating an authoritative work, a masterful work, he achieves only charm...
...the group in charge of today's new art...
...Yet his best paintings are lyric masterpieces...
...We lack only the new institutions-the anti-establishment art magazines, culture reviews, brave uncom-formist galleries, new art institutes, Salons des Refus?s-to support one...
...The wild brushstrokes leap and crackle, and the painting nearly shudders with force...
...And then we turn to the "art community" itself-on campus, running the galleries, publishing the culture periodicals...
...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...
...What haunts us in the end is not what these pictures show, but what they fail to show...
...In The Veteran in a New Field (1865), the returned soldier works with his back to us, scything wheat...
...The thing he is trying to paint is unpaintable...
...He threw himself at that problem again and again like waves slamming rocks, but it defeated him...
...He understood this weakness and fought against it, painting out details and seeking purity...
...To make interesting paintings he needed, more than any of his major contemporaries, to see interesting things...
...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...
...He did best when he suppressed it...
...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...
...The colors of autumn are warm, ordinarily, but these particular rusts and yellow-greens are chilly, in defiance of logic and color wheels...
...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...
...An outside observer might guess that art in this country has never been more popular or better served...
...About what...
...Homer held up that kind of sport for inspection in a series of beautiful and chilling pictures, of which An October Day is one...
...had a master illustrator's eye for detail...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 25
