WINSLOW HOMER is dead 100 years this year, and this large volume is tied to a major exhibition of his work. Unless you know the leading American galleries reasonably well, you are unlikely to have seen much of his work outside reproductions; so far as I know, there is not a single picture by him in any English (or Irish) public collection, though in Paris there is at least one, in the Musee d'Orsay, which came from the old Luxembourg. He is a great American artist who can scarcely be seen outside America.
Homer was a Bostonian, like Henry James, who admired his work in a slightly reluctant way but recoiled from his raw, unadorned, all-American subject matter. Boston, however, offered Homer little prospect as a painter and after a few years as a hack illustrator he moved to New York, where he gained what formal instruction he ever had, which was not a great deal. He saw some of the Civil War at first hand, as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly, and made it the subject for the first painting of his which caught the public's attention, Prisoners from the Front. He also witnessed the terrible Wilderness battles between Grant and Lee (which he painted), and the siege of Petersburg.
Homer spent a year in Paris, and worked for some months in an isolated English fishing village, where he painted the local fisherfolk and watched a shipwreck at first hand (the crew were saved). In fact, this ultra-American artist was rather a traveller, visiting Cuba and painting for long stretches in the Bahamas where he produced his late, matchless watercolours. In later life, as he grew increasingly disillusioned with New York and the contemporary art climate, he retreated to a coastal house and studio at Prout's Neck in Maine where he lived alone, painted the sea and ships, and took long fishing and shooting trips into the wilds which supplied him with the themes for many of his finest works. Like Jack London, he saw and experienced the last of the old outdoors, frontier America which the 20th century has gradually eroded away.
Homer was, and felt himself to be, a true-blue New England Yankee, self-reliant, close-mouthed, industrious, shrewd about money, a doer rather than a talker or theoriser. One man who sat with him on an art jury said he looked and sounded rather like a well-to-do, friendly stockbroker, though others - especially those who tried to breach his privacy - sometimes found him churlish and short-tempered. After one early, unsuccessful attachment - it can hardly be called an affair - he seems to have cut, women out of his life. apart from his family and the wives of a few close friends. Homer was, in fact, a bachelor and a man's man of the old school, with the distinctively male ethos and sense of the adventurous and heroic which are out of favour today.
By common consensus he is the greatest American artist of the 19th century, and his monumental realism has been an inspiration down to artists such as Hopper and Wyeth. Homer created a whole panoramic image of his native continent, spacious, heroic, homely and elemental, and he did it with artistry as well as power - especially in his watercolours, which have very few equals and no superiors. He was a true-born democrat of art, who painted farmers, hunters, fishermen and ordinary soldiers instead of antique heroes and goddesses, or the world of the rich and fashionable, and showed that a bare stretch of sea and rocky coastline could be as significant as the Alps or the Roman Campagna.
Which makes it particularly unfortunate that this otherwise useful and scholarly book should make him the victim of fashionable psycho-babble and gender jargon. Homer's most famous (if not his best) painting, The Gulf Stream, is analysed as an unconscious image of his alleged fear and hatred of women; the forlorn negro sailor stretched on the small dismasted boat, with yawning, expectant sharks only feet away from him, is cast as an unwitting selfportrait, with the shark mouths as a metaphor (of course!) for that overworked cliche, the vagina dentata. Homer painted women often and affectionately, ranging from elegant, hoop-skirted girls playing croquet (then the rage) to sturdy fisherwomen and buxom negresses. These are not the creations of an invert or a misogynist; and a man whose art is so positive, so sane and so direct, should have been spared this tendentious sludge.
SINCE early American art is not something we are, or were, much exposed to, its history around the turn of the century can be confusing to all except period scholars and experts. Who came first "The Ten" or "The Eight"? What was the exact relationship between the American and European schools? How "provincial" was American art before Modernism reached it? And was there a flourishing, independent, "native" art, or was it derivative and quasi-colonial?,
The so-called Ashcan School - the term was originally a derisive one - of New York realists did not include any painter of the first rank, and its members were innovators in terms of subject matter only, not in style or form. The six ones who counted, George Bellows, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, earned much of their bread and beer as illustrators, though they were excellent illustrators and at least this threw them into direct, first-hand contact with the teeming, raw, immigrant-crammed city life around them. They had some Irish links, since Sloan became a close friend of John Butler Yeats, and others of the group grew to like the old exile and enjoyed his famous conversation.
The Ashcan painters were most convincing as vigorous, objective observers of the life of the streets, the theatres, dancehalls and boxing rings, the teeming New York tenements, and they too possessed the radical American conscience; when they moved to an intimate level, they were relatively commonplace and few of them escaped a certain tonal coarseness. Yet collectively they created a vital chapter in their country's art and they proved with elan that ordinary, everyday, banal subjects could be turned into valid art. This lively, well-illustrated book does them justice, and looking at certain, of the reproductions I wondered, once again, how well Jack Yeats can have known their work. My own guess is much better than he would have admitted, or than his commentators have noticed.