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Modernizing Winslow Homer Sarah Burns (bio) Winslow Homer, (organized by Nikolai Cikovsky, Jr., and Franklin Kelly, National Gallery of Art) at the National Gallery of Art, 15 October 1995–28 January 1996; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 21 February 1996–26 May 1996; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 20 June 1996–22 September 1996. Catalogue: Winslow Homer. By Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., and Franklin Kelly. National Gallery of Art: Washington, D.C. in association with Yale University Press: New Haven, Conn., 1995. 420 pages. 300 illustrations (some color). $60.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). “Winslow Homer is widely regarded as the greatest American painter of the nineteenth century.” These—the first words to greet viewers of the Winslow Homer (1836–1910) retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—vividly telegraphed the agenda of the show’s organizers and sponsors, and the galleries through which large crowds of visitors slowly shuffled were dedicated to driving home the truth of this ambitious claim. What did it mean to be “the greatest American painter”? The plaque at the entrance elaborated on this a bit. Homer’s work, it said, “was highly individual both in subject matter and style.” His art “never ceased to grow” from the “distinctive” images of the Civil War that marked his first attempts to paint in oils, to the “powerful, heroic seascapes” of his later years. Thus primed, viewers retraced Homer’s path to greatness through a [End Page 615] suite of seven rooms displaying nearly two hundred works, somewhat tightly packed together, on walls that ranged from teal blue for the early years, to mushroom brown for the middle decades, to an intensely dark blue-green in the final gallery, where the “heroic” late seascapes shimmered in the glow of brilliantly focused spotlights. Saturated and satiated, visitors exited directly into the cheerful Homer boutique, where along with serious merchandise, notably the hefty, scholarly exhibition catalogue, there was a substantial offering of comic relief in the form of twig pencils, trout refrigerator magnets, and compact discs featuring sea songs and chanteys. Outside, the streets of Boston hailed the native son’s return (Homer was Boston born and bred): posters and signs bearing images of his barefoot country boys and hardy trail guides were hung all around town. BayBank, which sponsored the show’s Boston appearance, issued a credit card adorned with the same rustic motif: Boys in a Pasture (1874), in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts. The Homer retrospective was the latest in a series of major, millennial shows dedicated to reviewing, reassessing, and canonizing or recanonizing selected American “greats” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: among them, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, James McNeill Whistler. Even the eccentric late nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil still-life painter William Michael Harnett was the subject of an elaborately mounted show in 1992. 1 Such exhibitions indicate how greatly the currency of American art, and its scholarship, have risen over the last two decades. As a painter who in his own day was widely celebrated as America’s greatest (and most American), Homer was clearly ripe for a new blockbuster of his own. The initiative came from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where prominent Homer scholar Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., and Franklin Kelly undertook the immense project of organization, research, and interpretation. Their catalogue introduction explains that more than twenty years have passed since the last “comprehensive monographic exhibition,” organized by Lloyd Goodrich for the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1973. During the last two decades, research has expanded in every direction as scholars have attempted to “disinter precisely the kind of personal and cultural meanings” the ever-reticent Homer “always refused to discuss.” Viewed by Goodrich’s generation as a “purely American and purely realist artist,” Homer has metamorphosed into a profound, complex, and cosmopolitan figure surrounded by a “rich interpretative constellation” so elastic that it can contain anything from the most rigorously grounded social-contextual analysis, to psychobiographical or psychosexual readings [End Page 616] of his work. 2 The organizers’ stated aim, countering the plurality and diversity of this ever-growing archive, was to “put Homer back together in a...
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