Summer 2014
Winslow Homer – On the Beach – ca. 1869. Oil on Canvas. Arkell Museum at Canajoharie.
“Winslow Homer: The Nature and Rhythm of Life” on view at Cooperstown’s Fenimore Art Museum through August 24, displays a small but comprehensive collection of paintings shown in its entirety for the first time. On loan from the Arkell Museum, which is located in Canajoharie and was established by Bartlett Arkell, founder of the Beech-Nut Company, the show, which also includes two other Homer works, one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, enables the viewer to take in the range of Homer’s work within the space of a single room. It begins with his earliest known painting, made in the 1850s when he was still a teenager, a rural scene of a boy feeding chickens, and culminates with an example of the rugged, elemental seascapes of the Maine coast painted in his last decades. Expertly hung and accompanied by informative wall texts, which serve to heighten the works’ appeal, the exhibition beautifully showcases the themes, formal concerns, and stylistic experimentation of this American original—what David Tatham, in his essay in the excellent catalog, refers to as “a career-long sequence of self-motivated episodes of innovative new work.”
“By showing these works, you get insight into the collecting philosophy and acumen of Arkell,” said Paul D-Ambrosio, president and CEO of the Fenimore. “You also see what people were thinking of Winslow Homer in the 1930s, a few decades after his death. It provides an overview of all the important developments in his career.”
Represented is one to several samples each of Homer’s work from the Civil War; of rural scenes featuring children and shepherdesses; of sailing craft; of well-dressed women posed on the beach; of the fisher folk from the north coast of England, gazing wistfully out to sea; of the wonderfully spontaneous, light-filled watercolors of the Bahamas, plus a watercolor, very different in mood, depicting the haunting, jungle-like landscape of northern Florida; and, as mentioned, of the late Maine seascapes. The only conspicuous absence is his watercolors of hunting and fishing scenes in the Adirondacks, which is made up for by several iconic works that defy easy categorization.
When Arkell acquired the works in the 1930s and 1940s—they were displayed with his other American paintings, along with copies of European art, in the library and art gallery he established in Canajoharie in the 1920s–Homer’s reputation was at its peak, thanks in large part to the scholarship of Lloyd Goodrich. Homer was born in 1836 in Boston and died at Prout’s Neck, Maine, in 1910, and during his lifetime, the very qualities that have continued to intrigue and seduce art lovers were frequently disparaged by critics: his powerful compositions, in which the representation takes on a deeper emotional resonance thanks to the simplification and harmony of the formal elements; a fresh directness of means, especially in his plein air watercolors; a deft naturalism, which captures the fleeting nature of experience; and his preference for everyday subjects, characterized by the closeness of man to nature, a force that was alternatively benign and destructive. In his depictions of children at play on the rocks or figures posed on the beach or shore, the natural setting usually predominates, establishing humankind’s position in the universe.
It’s hard to imagine that the oil painting On the Beach, which Arkell found “soul inspiring” and was a personal favorite, originally belonged to a larger work that was lambasted by critics when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1869. According to the catalog, one critic described this depiction of a beach with figures, breaking surf, and overcast sky as “a Watering-place deformity.” The biting reviews prompted Homer to cut the painting into pieces, of which On the Beach and a second, smaller section showing children cavorting amid the waves is all that survives.
Today this painting strikes one as a masterwork, with its immediacy and darkly luminous beauty. Infused with the energy of the sea and sky, which dwarves the Victorian beachcombers—a row of women, positioned on the far left, standing barefoot on the beach clutching their ballooning skirts above their knees–the work prefigures Homer’s late seascapes, with its subdued color scheme in a minor key and stark composition of contrasting horizontal bands. It’s as if the painter himself had channeled nature’s elemental force. While the coloration of the figures’ flesh and clothing—cream, golds, blues and dark red that recall the palette of Manet– complement the seascape, their small, rounded forms are like punctuation marks, insignificant compared to the vastness of the sea and sky. The pearly luminescence of the reflections of the waves and figures on the drenched beach, signifying a brief moment in time; the contrasting blackish green horizontal band of the surf, which is echoed in a second band of incoming waves and the dark line of the distant horizon, and contrasts with the brilliant white impasto describing the breaking wave; and the subdued but rich coloration of the overcast sky, with a hint of blue revealed between brownish gray and pinkish clouds—all are a tribute to Homer’s sharp observational powers and mastery of the expressive qualities of paint.
A successful illustrator who visited the Union troops at the front during the Civil War for Harper’s Weekly, then the leading news weekly, Homer began exhibiting oil paintings in 1863 and had his first success as a fine artist with Prisoners from the Front, painted a year after the war, which depicts a Union officer questioning three captured Confederate troops after a battle (not in the show). The exhibition includes an earlier Civil War canvas, In Front of the Guard-House, in which a backlit soldier holding a log perches on an upended wooden box before a soldier pointing his bayonette—presumably punishment for intoxication, a fascinating historical footnote of a practice that strikes one as barbaric today.
Despite the popularity of Prisoners from the Front, Homer insisted on going his own way, painting subjects that met disapproval from critics and developing a style disparaged for its lack of finish and detail. (By the 1880s, however, after he had earned a following with his watercolors, the reviews were largely positive.) His representations sometimes confounded critics, such as the 1875 watercolor Contraband, which depicts an African American child and a Zouave soldier seated on a ledge and jointly grasping the soldier’s canteen. According to Tatham’s essay in the catalog, it’s possibly an allegory for the collapse of Reconstruction, with the solider personifying the federal government’s fading support for its Freedmen’s Bureau schools and other programs established by the Lincoln Administration to help the freed slaves and the boy personifying the pleas of a younger generation of blacks to preserve the programs.
Moonlight, a watercolor from 1874, is another unusual work and the subject of a catalog essay by scholar Sarah Burns. Homer never married, although it is believed that he had loved a certain young woman, represented in some of his paintings, who rejected him. Burns speculates she was Helena de Kay, an artist with whom Homer had crossed ways in New York City and who vacationed in the Catskills the same summer as Homer, in 1871 or 1872. De Kay later married someone else, and Moonlight may possibly reference her rejection of Homer. The watercolor depicts two figures, their backs facing the viewer, sitting on the beach gazing out at the full moon reflected over the sea. The space between them is infused with tension, as the woman seems to pull away from the man leaning toward her, her spread fan forming a barricade. The skeins of dark, skeletal seaweed in the foreground, the stark, distinct shadows cast by the two figures, and the horizontal movement out of the canvas described by the tilting clouds, the distant schooner and the lacy spray of the surf suggest desolation rather than warm, romantic passion.
Homer was a pioneer in watercolor, “a medium traditionally associated with women and finishing-school work,” according to d’Ambrosio. “It wasn’t considered a serious art form until Homer has his success in the 1870s.” Many of the watercolors in the show are tour de forces of his handling of light, tonal variations, and composition, achieved by a variety of techniques. The See-Saw, in which pairs of boys sit on either end of a sea saw, literally represents a composition as active as it is balanced, with the triangle formed by the central boy standing astride the see-saw echoed by the surrounding rocks and background buildings.
The Pumpkin Patch, in which a boy in profile holding a pumpkin crosses a field, derives its lively rhythm from the syncopated placement of the vertical cornstalks, their tassels delicately rendered as light-against-dark and dark-against-light squiggly forms. Above the Sea, Tynemouth, among the group of watercolors made on England’s northern coast during the artist’s ten-month sojourn from 1881 to 1882, depicts a fisherman gazing out at a stormy sea from a bluff with the utmost economy of means, imbuing the topical scene with existential meaning.
Some of the oils in the show also appeal to the contemporary eye with their reductive forms and tightly constructed compositions. Homer was a contemporary of the French Impressionists, but works such as Girl at the Fence, a pastoral scene of a shepherdess posed contemplatively amidst her herd of sheep in a mountain landscape, is more similar, in its earthy colors, contrasting lights and darks, and solid forms, to Courbet, Corot, and other painters of the Barbizan school. The 1878 work is in stark contrast to the dashed-off forms, in translucent browns, reds, and blues, of Sponge Fishing, Bahamas, a watercolor that captures the brilliant light and strong color of the Caribbean with its fresh spontaneity. The show presents compelling evidence of Homer’s uncontested place in the pantheon of American painters—his uncompromising originality, defiance of stylistic pigeonholes, and commitment to truth. His legacy is a body of work that distills the American cultural threads of his time into an artistic vision that is both austere and sensuous, contemplative and expansive, singular and collective.
After checking out the Homer show, be sure to visit the museum’s Thaw collection of American Indian art, consisting of nearly 1,000 artifacts housed in a separate wing, its folk art galleries and especially, the contemporary acrylic paintings of historic scenes from New York State by L.F. Tantillo. Following months of research, Tantillo painstakingly re-creates the structures, sailing ships, clothing, and other material details of lost moments from the past, be it a man driving a beer wagon at sunset on the flats south of Albany, circa 1650, a barge tied up at dawn on the Erie Canal, illuminated by gaslight, a locomotive chugging past the cigar store, café, and other cheerily lit stores on Syracuse’s Washington Street on a winter evening in 1933, the trading house on Castle Island in 1614, which was the first nonnative building constructed in New York, or the windmill perched on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River in New Amsterdam, on the very spot occupied by the World Trade Center more than 300 years later. Tantillo is not only a choreographer of historic details but also of light and atmosphere, which imbues his narrative scenes with the power of cinema. But unlike a movie, you can look and look, traveling back to that most exotic country of all—the past.
“Winslow Homer: The Nature and Rhythm of Life from the Arkell Museum at Canajoharie” is on exhibit through August 24, after which it will be display at the Arkell Museum from September 2 through January 4, 2015. “A Moment Past: L.F. Tantillo Paints New York History” is on display through December 31, 2014.