AMERICA'S SUPREME REALIST

By ROBERT HUGHES

Was Winslow Homer the greatest American painter of the 19th century? Around 1900, many Americans would have said yes. The reputation of Thomas Eakins stood nowhere near its present zenith, and there was something flashy and slightly suspicious about John Singer Sargent, the other main candidate. And Homer was not only big with the public; he exerted a huge influence on younger painters. Robert Henri and the other realists of the Ashcan School embraced him as a role model--the virile eye, always staring at reality over the pencil. "The big strong thing," said Henri, thinking of Homer's seascapes, "can only be the result of big strong seeing."

Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, John Marin, Marsden Hartley--they all owed Homer something. His images of men, sea and mountain, and especially of women, were asexual, but that only made them more American, and saved them from the whiff of scandal that clung to Eakins. His mastery and fluency--in oil and especially in watercolor, which he was largely responsible for establishing as a serious medium in America--were the envy and secret despair of many an artist. The triumph of modernism after the 1930s, however, put Homer's reputation on the downgrade; he looked like an illustrator, with his jumping trout and scudding catboats. Thirty years ago, anyone rash enough to suggest that he was at least as important an artist as Jackson Pollock would have been laughed to silence.

Not anymore. If there is any single lesson to be learned from the great Homer retrospective that was seen in past months at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and that opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it's that Homer was not just a fine American painter but one of the great realist artists of the 19th century as a whole, comparable in achievement to Manet or Courbet, if not Degas. The show's curators, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, have brought enormous scholarly energy to arguing this on the walls, winnowing Homer's 2,000 or so surviving works to some 180 paintings, watercolors and drawings. The condensation we see is one of the real glories of American art, a sustained celebration of that line of empirical vision that began with John Singleton Copley in the 18th century and passed through Audubon, Eakins and Homer into the early 20th. It also reveals a Homer more complicated, both in his ideas and his symbolism, than most people thought existed. Can you "rediscover" an artist who is this popular? If he's as good as Homer, emphatically yes.

Like Copley, Homer was from Boston and mainly self-taught. In the 1850s Boston had no art school, and his only training was in a lithography shop. This led to illustration work for magazines, and at 25 he went to cover the Civil War for Harper's Weekly. His Civil War paintings, as distinct from those illustrations, were mostly genre scenes in camp--soldiers relaxing or on punishment duty. His most popular early painting, and deservedly so, was Prisoners from the Front, 1866, which shows the Union's General Francis Barlow receiving three Confederate soldiers captured at the battle of Spotsylvania: a young, tough Virginian cavalryman, a grizzled old vet and a lumpish "poor white" boy. Though it has been praised for its evenhandedness, it's hard to see how, short of caricature, Homer could have come up with a more ideological image of the difference between the two sides of the war. Barlow looks frank and intelligent, contrasted with the mean-as-hell firebrand look of the Southern cavalier, the old man who is too old to change and the cracker kid who is too dumb to develop.

Not one of the Civil War paintings shows a dead body, but Homer did allegorize death in a painting done just after the war, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. A man in a white shirt, whose face we don't see, has returned to his farm, and is scything its ripe wheat, which stretches to the blue band of the horizon. His blue Army jacket and water canteen, lying on the ground, identify him as a Union soldier. The composition is stark: one man, two planes of color--the stalks of wheat swiftly done in ocher with umber streaks of shadow rising through them from the earth--and the crooked diagonal of the scythe at the end of its swing. We are meant to think of Isaiah: "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

But why a new field? Here, as co-curator Cikovsky's brilliant catalog essay points out, a deeper level is seen. The new field of wheat recalls the soldier's "old" field--the ghastly killing grounds, some of which (like Antietam) were actually wheat fields, where the ripe youth of America was mowed down. And so an image that ostensibly speaks of sunlit peace and reconciliation remains a harsh and troubling one and presages the symbolic note that will flicker in and out of Homer's art for the next 40 years, making it very much more than a celebration of America the Beautiful.

After the war, however, Homer--like all other American artists except the sculptor Saint-Gaudens--worked as though the trauma was best forgotten. He turned to an ideal but real subject matter as far from death as possible. This was childhood. Homer painted the life of American children as a distinct state, an enclosure: adults hardly touch their lives, but you know they are secure. His farmers' and fishers' children are, on one level, part of the wide idealization of childhood that took hold in 1870s America as a reaction against the war. They are potential America, the stock from which renewal will spring: young, strong, practical and without pretense, and bathed in Homer's candid, crystalline light.

Homer shows them learning skills (sailing, fishing, farm work) and getting their education in the schoolhouse. Henry James found Homer's "barefoot urchins and little girls in calico sun-bonnets...almost barbarously simple" and "horribly ugly," but conceded that they won you over: Homer "has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier...he has incontestably succeeded." Homer was one of the key figures in whose work Americanness ceased to be an embarrassment. The cultural cringe before Europe vanishes and is replaced by a robust confidence in American experience.

Which is not to say he hadn't learned from Europe. His paintings of children sometimes reach for a rough kind of classical energy. The frieze-line of kids running parallel to the picture plane in Snap the Whip, 1872, brings to mind the dancing putti on Donatello's Cantoria in Florence. He had a knack for inserting distant echoes of the classical into the forms of common life, and doing it so subtly that you're scarcely aware of them at first. Homer went to London in 1881 and then settled in the village of Cullercoats on the coast, near Newcastle. He painted the fisherfolk: the men, massive in their rain-slicked oilskins, and the women mending nets and waiting on shore. The distended shapes of windblown clothes give these already robust female figures a sculptural air: you feel the gale blowing their aprons into spinnakers. Homer had to have been looking at the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum, with their fluent drapery rippling across limbs and torso. Sometimes these shawled women, silhouetted against the scudding gray, have the presence of Greek mourners. At Cullercoats he found a basic image: man (or woman) against the sea, the self in the enormous, indifferent context of nature.

In the spring of 1883, Homer shut down his New York studio and moved to Prout's Neck, a narrow strip of rock on the Maine coast. There he found himself a cottage overlooking the sea--a good place for a man whose four favorite words, a friend recalled, were "Mind your own business." He spent 27 years at Prout's Neck, relieved by excursions to New York and fishing trips to the Caribbean, Florida and the Adirondacks. Its steep, sea-gnawed granite ledges became the emblematic landscape of his finest work. No artist since Turner had painted the sea with such lyric concentration, from the beaming blue transparency of the Caribbean, captured in masterly watercolors, to the sullen beat and topple of gray combers driven by an Atlantic gale on the Maine rocks. Cannon Rock, 1895, with its high horizon line and broad V of incoming waves framed by dark rocks, exactly captures the sensation of standing on an exposed promontory with the sea coming straight at you, like a wall.

Yet Homer did not simply view the sea as a danger. His sea pieces, even when the weather is bad, are seductive. The paint is of great richness, beautifully manipulated, running the gamut from thin, subtle glazes to expansive slathers of opaque pigment. And there is often a character of apparition: things are stranger than you imagine, though you believe he saw what he saw--witness the heads of the Gloucester fishermen appearing from the wave that hides their dory in Kissing the Moon, 1904, or the breaking wave on the rocks in West Point, Prout's Neck, 1900, that flings up an S curve of foam that might be a sinuous white torso: the ghost of a female presence, a water witch.

Such works remind you that the view of Homer that was current 20 years ago, and that this show corrects--that he was a realist in a simple and straightforward way--was wrong. It reckons without the deep strand of existential pessimism that runs in Homer's work and that creates its own symbolic structures. For Homer, as for another great and underrated artist, his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, man is at constant war with his surroundings in a world that cares nothing about him and gives him no natural allies. The moment you step from the social path, where security is an illusion, all becomes wild and strange, and Homer's work abounds in metaphors of this. One of the most piercing is Fox Hunt, 1893, which portrays the animal as existential hero. A starving red fox, set with Japanese simplicity and directness against a field of white snow, is harried by sinister crows that, though they cannot kill him, are harassing him toward his death.

Six years later, he painted The Gulf Stream, moving this apprehension from animal to man. A black sailor lies on the afterdeck of a dismasted sloop, adrift and rudderless in the deep Caribbean blue. Enormous sharks circle the boat. Their ominousness is reinforced by the zone of black water from which they rise. (The catalog, rather absurdly, suggests that celibate Homer was invoking that hoary phantom of the Freudian couch, the vagina dentata. This could make sense only to an art historian who has never been near a live shark.) On the horizon, a square-rigger sails indifferently by, and we see the waterspout of a coming tornado. There will be no rescue. The painting refers back to other images of marine disaster, notably Turner's Slave Ship and Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, in an image of total pessimism. This, Homer says, is what the voyage of life comes down to: hanging on and facing down your death when all hope is gone and there are no witnesses. It is a grim and hard-won vision, but in it, as in his descriptive powers, Homer remained supremely a realist.