|
|
|
|
|
Stormy Weather
John Haberin New York City
Crosscurrents: Winslow Homer
As the Gulf Stream flows from the Gulf of Mexico past the Florida coast, it picks up tropical heat and moisture, much as the flow of arctic air dooms New Yorkers to seemingly endlessly winters. It helps create fertile lands and sunlit beaches—and supplies a tool for navigating them all. The warmth extends across the Atlantic as far as Norway, sparing its shores from polar ice.
Yet it carries with it tropical storms that were devastating enough for Winslow Homer long before climate change made them inescapable. As for those fertile lands, they included the plantations of the Deep South and Caribbean, where the sugar trade brought colonization and slavery. Spain occupied Cuba before a long rebellion and a short war left it nominally independent, but in the shadow of the United States. The Bahamas were still notably black, and Homer visited to observe just that. In The Gulf Stream, he painted a black man in a small boat, heroic but almost surely about to die. Now it has pride of place in "Crosscurrents" at the Met. 
The Gulf wars
How do you remember Winslow Homer? If you are like most people, you will think first of sunlight and pleasure. No one else has left the side of a boat or a summer home so crisp and clear. No one else has found so many degrees of whiteness, not even Robert Ryman in postwar abstraction. They appear, too, in clear skies and billowing dresses. They animate Homer's first embrace of pure, bright colors, in Dressing for the Carnival from 1877.
You may associate sunlight itself with carnivals and free play. He painted boys holding hands for Snap the Whip and girls with their dog at the beach. One is wringing out her bathing suit, baring just enough skin to scandalize the critics. You may associate the sun, too, with quiet afternoons, and Homer found A Fair Wind in a summer's breeze. He had his Garden in Nassau with the brightest of flowers. He spent his last thirty-five years before his death in 1910 at Prouts Neck, in Maine, where ample space to himself was a given and leisure was a gift.
There as in the Bahamas or in Virginia after the Civil War, he went where it took to see things for himself. When he painted a sharpshooter, quite possibly his first work in oil, he asked to hold the rifle and to look down its telescopic sight—which made him feel an accessory to murder. Observation mattered a lot in those days for landscape painters. Still, a valley for Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School collects the sun like molasses in a pitcher. Homer's fragmented and shifting reflections are neither hazy nor subdued. Sunlight for him can be a still moment, but still a moment.
Landscape for Homer was always contested ground, like America itself. That could mean a contest between people, like the Civil War—and blacks dress for a carnival the very year of the withdrawal of federal troops and the end of Reconstruction. A black woman may be his sole figure not in motion, but only because she can face down an implicit white observer, including you. Where Cole preferred a picnic, Snap the Whip borders on violence, and a black child stands outside that garden in Nassau, looking in. Contest can pit humanity against nature, too, with no clear winner. Not even a sextant, a chronometer, and a rescue squad may save you from the storm.
Where does one version of Homer leave off, the sunlight and the struggle, and the other begin? That, too, keeps changing. Shooting the rapids can be dangerous, even as family entertainment. A young man mimes the motion of rowing, as if he could only wish for control. Hunting is entertainment, too, unless you depend on it for food—or unless you are the animal. Homer's very last oils show a fox leaping across the snow and goldeneye ducks in flight, but the fatal blow has landed.
With The Gulf Stream in 1899, repainted in 1907, the two versions vie for priority in a single painting—one that has fascinated Stacy Lynn Waddell as well. The highlights have never been stronger, on the side of the boat and the black man's powerful chest, but their source in sunlight is nowhere to be seen. Waves and clouds are darkly churning, and a waterspout rises in the background at right. The mast has broken off, and what look like nautical ropes may be stalks of sugar, a bitter reminder but shining of how a black man sustained a life. Sharks are just inches away, with blood already on the water. A three-master in the distance may promise rescue, but it seems little more than a ghost.
The dark side
The Met comes down squarely on the dark side, with themes of conflict and struggle. The Gulf Stream is visible from the show's entrance, through cuts in two partitions. It puts the visitor at an uncanny distance, like the sharpshooter up in the trees. Hunters in those final works never appear, apart from a puff of smoke from their guns. This is nature painting, but of a thoroughly impure nature. Only a full moon, in Kissing the Moon, brings a spooky moment of peace.
The museum notes his admiration for Charles Darwin, but this is not a dog-eat-dog world. Conflict is minimal within nature, and humanity can be forgiving as well. Confederate prisoners of war look ragged enough, their uniformed captor clean-cut, commanding, and young. Still, neither seems out for a confrontation. When African Americans face down an elderly white woman, you must judge the balance of power for yourself. When white males take over the scene, they ask to be rescuers at sea.
They may not pull it off, but failure, too, has its drama. With the 1990s, the storms take over, pushing humanity aside. The black man in The Gulf Stream may be all that is left. The rescuers are gone, clouds descend, and the unsettled waves reach for the sky. Rocks ascend to an unbreachable wall. They are also more and more shapeless. It becomes hard to differentiate sea, land, and sky.
The sharpshooter nestled in the branches shows Homer's early appreciation for unsettled diagonals without a place to stand. As in The Gulf Stream, boats rise to an unstable angle, with or without a storm. At a rescue station, a portal opens onto the sea as a huge slab of gray light. Talk all you like about the plot of his dramas, and wall text does so, but Homer relies on light not just for illumination, but for his compositions as well. It breaks through a cloud like skylights through a heavy ceiling. It forms a funnel of rising streaks akin to that waterspout.
Homer had an instinct for light as a source of drama in itself. It accounts for the extraordinary role of watercolors, as independent works of art. Nothing else taught him so much about sharp contrasts and clear light. His dedication to watercolor in the 1870s coincides with his exposure to African American communities, with their colorful clothes but bare feet. It persists through his turn to the sea. When he returned to painting, his art had changed for good.
Yet light enters from the very first, when his drawing was muddier and his colors more subdued. Like the sharpshooter, many early subjects are backlit, while secondary actors sink into shadow. A rebel stands dark and tall against the horizon at sunset, facing down far-off Union troops, but look again and a black man to his side plays the banjo for himself alone. He had no choice—and would that ghostly ship in The Gulf Stream have bothered to help, even if it could? Still, there is no simple way to distinguish conflict from sympathy or daring from mortal danger. There is only America as a matter of life and death.
The struggle today
As curators the Met's Sylvia Yount and Stephanie L. Herdrich, with Christopher Riopelle of the National Gallery in Washington, prefer the darkness. They may have felt the demand these days for curators to leave their mark and for exhibitions to have a clever theme. They may have felt the pressure to feature the museum's holdings, starting with The Gulf Stream. They rely on the collection for more than a quarter of the show and, often enough, its best-known work. With eighty-eight paintings and watercolors, they could have added another twenty to redress the balance. It would have produced a definitive retrospective, even in light of a far larger one at the Met in 1996, but this one will more than do.
Born in 1836, Homer was as young as many a soldier in the Civil War, nurturing his powers of observation and sympathy on the front line. After the war, he had a studio in New York, magazine assignments, and then an extended trip to London. Did he see work from across the Channel by Gustave Courbet, and did Courbet's realism inspire his dark rocks? Did Camille Corot and Pre-Impressionism enhance the dusty whites of his waves—or Claude Monet and Impressionism?
Maybe, though I doubt it, but Homer was one of a kind—and that kind had everything to do with light. It puts the viewer in the position of the artist and observer, as in that awkward entrance at the Met. It could be the light of Gloucester, in Massachusetts, or the Gulf Stream. It could be the light of either version of the artist, in sunshine or struggle. Both for him are part of a chronicle of American life. It is an ongoing chronicle, the show concludes, extending to black artists today.
Homer has a room of his own in the Met's American wing—and it has never looked smaller, now that one can see how much it might hold. While the exhibition has emptied it of his work, three contemporary artists happily step in. If he could portray African Americans as the chronicle's true heroes, they return the favor with a riff on his century of American art. The Met calls them three generations, although they range in age only from thirty-nine to sixty-six. Their relevance to Homer is exaggerated as well. They show America's most lasting conflict all the same.
The youngest, Hugh Hayden, carves a boat with a rib cage as its hull, formidable and at risk, but it seems a long way from The Gulf Stream and a black man's bare chest. Kara Walker might have in mind the retrospective's title, "Crosscurrents," more than Homer. Like Robert Colescott, she gives Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze an all-black cast. Kerry James Marshall, who has painted the black male and curated work for the Met, brings more sustained attention. His five seascapes could be studies by Homer himself, but with a pointedly subdued light. For a bonus, Elizabeth Colomba updates Madame X by John Singer Sargent a few rooms away
Walker's actors would be mugging for the camera if she had one, rather than twelve feet of watercolor and ink. They could also be a minstrel show, but she is way too self-aware to blame black Americans for their stereotypes, and they are too exuberant to settle for one. Working in 1997, Colomba has more obvious respect for her subject, and its echoes are devastating. Sargent's fashionable subject, it turns out, was of mixed race—and Colomba's black woman fully matches her elegance and independence. A second woman, in a painting on the wall, leaves her identity for you to pin down, but this is, after all, Madame X. As with Homer, to look squarely at America is to face conflict, the unacknowledged, and the unknown.
Winslow Homer ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 31, 2022.