Odd Couple: Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington

Beautiful art and book, great museums, but Mythmakers doesn’t persuade.

I saw Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth in January. I had a nice, long visit to the exhibition, which has splendid work by both artists. This compensated for seeing Mythmakers too quickly on the way to Mount Desert Island when I ran through the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, in early fall. It was at the Denver Art Museum last year.

An exhibition about Remington (1861–1909) and Homer (1936–1910) is bound to stumble, and this one does. Homer’s a giant, and Remington isn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth a visit. Definitive, gorgeous work by both is there. Sometimes rambunctious, sometimes sublime, the art is quintessentially American. In thinking about what’s American about American art, I’d certainly count at least one or two of the Homers in the show as foundational.

The West Wind, by Homer, from 1890, is as grand as he gets, as is Coast in Winter. His Snap the Whip, from 1872, is there, a painting in the visual vocabulary of most Americans. Remington cowboy-and-Indian pictures are resplendent and numerous. The Amon Carter has so many of the finest. The museum has just been beautifully renovated, and its collection — only American art — looks great. So many of the Homers were painted in Prouts Neck, down the road from Portland. Remington’s late nocturnes are lovely and mysterious.

In an exhibition, the introductory panel is the place where we learn “what’s the point.” It’s the who, what, when, where, and why basics informing the assembly of the art we’ll see. At the Amon Carter, the introduction doesn’t say much. I’m surprised by how vague it is, or how vacuous and misleading. Is there no there there?

The introduction immediately describes Homer and Remington as “self-taught” and “homegrown,” and I wonder why the panel puts these in quotation marks. Is somebody faking it? Nobody, from the artists themselves to their critics and buyers, then and since, ever used the little art education they had as a marketing point. And both are decidedly homegrown in that they’re not foreign. A small point, I know, but does Mythmakers suggest they’re poseurs? To some degree, yes, and for no good reason. I find myself, I thought, in a skeptical frame of mind.

“They came to stand for a distinctive American identity, particularly during an era of massive and destabilizing social, environmental, and cultural change.” Best to say up front what that “distinctive American identity” is, since that’s a big, meaty topic. It stays a bit of a mystery, but it has something to do with constructions of masculinity.

I wish art historians wouldn’t hitch an argument on the notion that a particular decade in America had an unusually majestic set of tumults. Every decade in American history presents “an era of massive . . . change,” be it social, cultural, environmental, political, or economic. At least that’s the case in each of the many decades I’ve occupied the planet. And what era? Homer’s life, for instance, spans the age of Jackson to the Progressive era, and these two bookend as many as five or six others.

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik writes an elegant essay introducing the catalogue. He’s a great thinker and graceful writer. He can tackle most subjects, but he’s Canadian. I like Canadians, but a Canadian who’s worked for The New Yorker for 35 years might not give an artist like Remington the benefit of the doubt, and Gopnik doesn’t. Having found no firm footing in the introductory panel, or in most of the labels, I read his essay.

“What we see when we see Remington is a complicated palimpsest of brief moments of observation, long sessions of calculation, neat packages of newly made myth, and the final purposes of Americanist propaganda,” Gopkin writes, as if this is a revelation. It’s not. Bill Truettner’s exhibition, The West As America, made this point 30 years ago. Alex Nemerov’s Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America did the job on Remington, and correctly so, in 1995.

Gopnik describes Remington’s work as “deliberately propagandistic and blind to its underlying truths,” and maybe that’s true. The problem with this is Mythmakers’ biggest bungle. Remington is a propagandistic painter and very limited. Homer isn’t, and he’s vast. I’ll write more on the unevenness of the two artists in vision and achievement, but I’ll explore the show’s factual flaws first.

Of Remington, Gopnik writes, “his horses seem emotionally on edge, his cowboys semi-hysterical in ways that one instinctively knows could only very rarely correspond to the actualities of making and building and cooking and roping and living that were the dredging dailies of frontier life.” Since Gopnik is a lifelong city slicker, I’m wondering what his expertise might be, but that’s a small point.

A picture like Remington’s A Dash for the Timber, from 1889, has the ring of truth in showing horses “emotionally on edge” and cowboys “semi-hysterical” since Indians are chasing them, guns ablazin’ all round. Were Gopnik on one of those frazzled horses, he’d wet his pants in full-blown hysteria. And those aren’t cowboys. They’re soldiers in the Apache War. In from the Night Herd, Fall of the Cowboy, or the sculpture The Bronco Buster are cowboy subjects.

What’s fake about these? Didn’t chases happen? Weren’t broncos ever busted? Weren’t there stampedes? Of course there were. Are Remington’s soldiers, cowboys, Indians, and horses inaccurately equipped? No, mostly.

There’s the obvious hole, too, in the show’s argument that Remington’s art glorifies the conquest of the West. A Dash for the Timber is a painting about retreat. The subtitle of Aiding a Comrade is “Past All Surgery.” Another one bites the dust, in other words. Fight for the Waterhole, from 1903, looks like a lost cause on every score, with Anglo defenders surrounded and the waterhole a puddle.

If a theme of the show is Remington’s mythmaking, the curators need to establish what reality was. And if Remington is to be faulted for not painting “the actualities of making and building and cooking and roping,” the problem is with the curators, aside from the fact that roping is a Remington staple. In 2021, they wish the artist painted what he didn’t want to paint in 1900.

Now, Remington might be a mythmaker because he misrepresents what was really happening in the American West in his day — conquest, land grabs, genocide, and a multitude of other no-no’s — and it’s fair to talk about those issues. That said, Remington might start as an illustrator of news stories but, at least toward the end of his career, he isn’t a reporter. In his day, reportorial objectivity wasn’t a standard for journalists, much as it’s not now. Remington is an artist. Artists aren’t producing nonfiction or documentaries. They’re visualizing stories. Remington admitted as much. “My West passed utterly out of existence so long ago as if to make it merely a dream,” he wrote. Gopnik makes the point, and I won’t call it a concession, that both are artists, and artists imagine.

Remington’s take is indeed retardative, I think, and that’s an angle. The Apache Wars ended with Geronimo’s surrender in 1886. Custer’s Last Stand was in 1876. Remington’s painting skirmishes with Indians years, though not too many years, after that. Why is he offering old material? Nostalgia? Was he positing an era of real men like cowboys in opposition to neurasthenic men, men frozen in doubt, like, for instance, Thomas Eakins’s The Thinker? If we’re positing that he’s depicting myths or propaganda, we need specifics.

Homer, though, the exhibition tells us, is a mythmaker, too, but the reasons are not only immaterial but trifling. Thematically, this is where the show fizzles. Gopnik admits that Homer’s myths “are less obviously dubious.” Homer presents a rough, isolated Maine, celebrating his own, and Mainers’, rugged individualism, when, in fact, Homer was a cosmopolitan elite and Prouts Neck a twee resort.

Jennifer Henneman’s essay — I learned a lot from it — says that Homer mythologized himself as a hermit isolated on Maine’s weather-beaten coast. He was, instead, a city slicker, too, living 25 years in New York City. Everyone involved in the show agrees that Homer and Remington marketed themselves with the fervor of a Bible salesman. Critics in their lifetimes praised both for their “absolute truth of fact” and “positive genius for facts” when both artists were fudgers.

This is all much ado about nothing. For a while, historians of American art, not Homer, positioned him as an isolated recluse, a genius alone by the sea conversing with muses, the stars, and the full moon once a month. That this isn’t true isn’t a discovery and isn’t important, either. Yes, Prouts Neck was a tiny, tony resort in Homer’s life, and, yes, he did ring a loud bell from his studio to signal the Jocelyn Hotel nearby that he wanted his lunch delivered. Homer lived in Prouts for 20 years but shuttled to Florida, too, and he wasn’t a hermit, as eccentric as he was. He wasn’t the life of the party, either. Who cares? Artists always are on the make, or at least artists who want to sell their work.

Homer painted West Point, Prout’s Neck in 1900. “Fifteen minutes after sunset — not one minute before,” he wrote of the subject. “It took many days of careful observation to get this — with a high sea and tide just right.” Where’s the mythmaking? Is there a reason to question him? I’ve been to Prouts Neck dozens of times. It’s easy to pick the spots Homer paints. His theme is the eternal clash of ocean waves and rocks. Not much changes. Prouts Neck offers scenery on par with that of Monhegan and Mount Desert. That Homer’s there and not living in a cave doesn’t make his works lesser icons of American realism.

At each venue, the curators assembled a citizen committee to comment on art in the show. Their observations are sometimes quoted in the labels. This is a new feature in exhibition planning. Museum brass feel that it adds the common touch, the voices of outsiders, and shows that the institution is “listening to the people.” It’s part of the inclusion fad. These committees usually involve people from the protest community and from grievance groups. The comments help insulate the museum from people’s wrath should a label say something that offends someone. I’m agnostic.

The Amon Carter assembled a good group. Bonnie Holding, a Master Maine Guide, looks at Coast in Winter as convincing — not fake, contrived, or the work of an imposter. The gray sky reflected in the water, the frozen mist, and the fullness of a wave “build, build, build, and then crash,” she says. Regardless of how chichi Prouts was in Homer’s lifetime, the sea is big and wild there, the weather’s a dramatic event, and the rocks are typical Maine rocks.

In the show and the catalogue, we learn that people who met Homer and Remington were “surprised that neither resembled their paintings’ muscled and stoic protagonists.” Homer was short, bald, and, in public, dressed like a banker, or at least Cecilia Beaux thought so when she met him once. Remington was overweight, a cigar smoker and bon vivant who hated Fort Worth. He abhorred its heat, flies, and dust. “If I owned Texas and hell,” Remington quoted General Philip Sheridan, “I’d rent Texas and live in hell.”

Are they guilty of appropriation, a felony in the social-justice-warrior criminal code and one of the more absurd offenses? It seems so, and, again, who cares?

I think the show wants to be about constructions of masculinity, but in the exhibition itself, it takes the hit-and-run approach. “The Broncho Buster,” we hear, “today represents the lasting mystique of the cowboy — his ruggedness and poise encapsulate a version of burly, independent American manhood.” Maybe, maybe not. I think, when it comes to cowboys, Larry McMurtry, High Noon, Red River, and Unforgiven condition us more than Remington. In any event, I assume this is one of the myths at issue in the show, and it’s haphazardly presented.

I think the museums involved in the show noodle the new theme that everything we call quintessentially American, or anything good, is fake. Fake, meretricious, tailored to suit an evil goal, a conceit, a tool to oppress, or a myth. Mythmakers doesn’t do the 1619 Project lurch for the jugular. It pokes and flirts. It’s a big muddle.

Gopnik’s essay, which I liked, finds a good, clear theme at the end. Probably it takes a Canadian to do this, both an outsider and a Montrealer, but, hell, Canada’s got its own West, and in Nova Scotia its own Maine. Homer and Remington, he says, “represent the two conjoined panels of American feeling: the energetic pulse and the stoic withdrawal, the replacement of feeling by action, and the withdrawal of feeling into enigma.” I would have cut the myth crap and made that the theme of the show — a much more difficult, complex, and subtle show but an amazing one suited to the fantastic art that Mythmakers gathered.

I’d quibble over small bits of interpretation. Ridden Down, by Remington, isn’t “shockingly brutal.” Statements like “the U.S. having killed or displaced Native communities to settle the continent, sought greater global influence through wars in Cuba and the Philippines” are either sloppy, false, or misleading, or they’re startling non sequiturs. Who is “the U.S.,” for instance? And “the continent” includes Canada, Mexico, and Central America, none of which “the U.S.” ever settled. The Spanish-American War concerned Cuba, a fevered dream among politicians for a hundred years. We got the Philippines as something between an unwanted bonus and a massive booby prize.

Homer’s late seascapes and Remington’s late nocturnes are in no way “a response to these changes and Americans’ anxieties about them,” at least in my opinion. Neither the show nor the catalogue offer any support, visual or literary, for this statement. It’s another example of hit-and-run art history.

Mythmakers has exceptionally good loans. The three museums have bargaining power. The museum in Portland has depth in the work of Homer and in Maine artists generally. It’s a stopping-off point for rich art lovers heading to Vinalhaven, Blue Hill, Mount Desert Island, and points north for the summer. The Amon Carter’s American collection is superb. Denver has pockets of strength. Each has well-liked curators and directors. The three are on the circuit for prestigious traveling shows.

That said, there’s no reason for Undertow, by Homer, one of the Clark Art Institute’s many great Homers, to be in the show. The West Wind, from the Addison Gallery, has nothing to do with masculinity, myth, conquest, or American identity. Its subject is the wind, and it’s as close to Art for Art’s Sake abstraction as Homer comes. Homer’s Cape Trinity, from 1904, is brooding, even Gothic, and wasted. Remington’s nocturnes can go mano a mano with Homer’s late work and not get squashed. As gorgeous as they are, they’re not well used. Still, there’s nothing wrong with delectation.

We, in 2021, might not know the nuances in thought and behavior distinguishing one man coming of age in antebellum America and another in the Gilded Age. We have to assume, though, that these distinctions are numerous, and some differences are vast rather than trivial. We can’t talk enough about differences among Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. It’s one thing to have different styles and techniques as artists. It’s another to hail from a different zeitgeist, as Homer and Remington do.

Aesthetically, Homer descends from the Hudson River School of Cole, Church, and Durand and, further back, from the English landscapes and seascapes of Turner and Constable. Remington and Homer both started as illustrators for Harper’s Magazine, a news and lifestyle journal.

That’s the biggest thing they have in common, and that’s where I would have started the exhibition if the curators wanted to do a more nuts-and-bolts show as opposed to using Gopnik’s more psychological or emotional tack. What does it mean to be an illustrator in an era before news photography? How does that experience, in terms of engaging audiences and developing a style, affect each artist?

For both, their time as illustrators is essential. Homer engrains it, even as he sublimates it. It’s always there, though Homer’s style and subjects evolve gradually. Remington jettisoned the hard line and clear narrative of illustration late in his career. He dropped it when the tag “illustrator” undermined his marketability.

Their subject matter barely overlaps. Homer did seascapes and sea dramas, scenes of bourgeois leisure, and scenes of rural life. Remington never touched the stuff. Remington did cowboy-and-Indian art and, at one point, Impressionist-style landscapes. Homer did neither, ever. Remington was a sculptor in bronze. Homer was not. Homer did hundreds of watercolors, and they’re integral to his development as a studio painter. Remington did some watercolors, but it’s a sideline. Yes, they painted men doing manly things, but Homer is an important artist of women, too.

Remington’s embrace of Impressionist style and late-career nocturnes is as abrupt as it is careerist, even slick and wily. He isn’t propelled by vision but by the lure of new customers or, in the case of the nocturnes, by insecurity and resentment. He felt he wasn’t taken seriously as an artist, pegged as a mere illustrator. The most famous American artist ever, in Remington’s assessment, and the most highbrow, was Whistler, who did nocturnes, so Remington did nocturnes. They’re the best things he did, and each of the 20 or so are wistful, spooky, velvety things, but he arrived there in search of a new product line.

Homer, though, has vision. This vision organically brought him from his days as an illustrator, where he prized pictorial focus and eschewed fussy detail, to his late seascapes. There’s a path from start to finish. Nothing’s fitful or cunning. He had an immense start, coming of age as he did at the birth of American illustration and the modern news media and the cataclysmic Civil War. Homer’s from Boston. He’s got a Puritan streak and Boston heft. Remington’s from Ogdensburg, wherever that is in upstate New York.

There are moments in Mythmakers called “A Conservator’s View,” comparing Homer’s and Remington’s techniques. I liked these a lot and learned a lot, in the show itself and in Claire Barry and Peter Van de Moortel’s wonderful essay on technique.

These moments are irrelevant to the themes of the show, but substance is always welcomed.

Don Flemons is a musician and historian and a citizen committee member at the Amon Carter. I loved his comment about Aiding a Comrade, which he sees as a precursor to the Hollywood Western’s chase trope used a million times. Remington paints the horses in impressive detail, and the viewer looks at them first. Then we’re drawn to the man on the ground, then the Indian in the middle ground, and then to the theme of skirmish. Our eyes bounce back and forth. “This would be a 45-minute battle in a major Hollywood movie,” Flemons says, and I don’t doubt him.

There are many such good comments from the committee, and some pulled from thin air. Doug Rawlings, a co-founder of Veterans for Peace, thinks the figure in A Mountain Climber Resting is a Civil War veteran dealing with guilt over what he might have done during the war. “Moral injury arises when you realize that you’ve been involved in something that goes against your deepest moral code.” This is a flight of fancy. Rawlings sounds like he’d find an anti-war message in a bowl of mashed potatoes. Reggie Burrows Hodges, an artist, makes consistently smart observations.

I hesitated in doing this review, which isn’t a good one because it’s not a good exhibition. I know lots of the players and certainly think the three museums are great places. Its basic problem, aside from faddishness, is pairing two artists. Defining and negotiating their stylistic differences takes time, and then there’s the generational difference.

Some of the dumbest shows I’ve seen in the past ten years have opportunistically, even cravenly, put two famous artists on the marquee. I saw a dreadful show at the Clark a few years ago on Monet and Ellsworth Kelly, which didn’t even have the compensation of good art. The two artists have nothing to do with each other aside from Kelly’s having seen lots of Monets in France as a young man and admiring him, with a few Kelly squiggles purporting to prove a compelling influence. Its only merit was smallness so, like a euthanized patient, the curators put it out of its misery. It was paid for by a big donor, too.

I saw a show on Van Gogh and David Hockney last year at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. A version of it is now at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. I haven’t seen it there but, seeing it in Amsterdam, I thought it was a big moneymaker for the Van Gogh Museum and for Hockney, too. Almost all the Hockneys belonged either to the artist or his foundation. They’re mostly recent, and Hockney is long past his prime, so clinging to Van Gogh boosts their value. There was no scholarly merit in the show — none.

Mythmakers is much better. I’m glad I saw it. The art’s first-rate, the sections curated by painting conservators are rich, and, indeed, all the essays have good material. I enjoyed revisiting Homer and Remington through the work of such good scholars and writers. The exhibition seems to have been tweaked in Denver. It had a different title, “Natural Forces,” and the mythmaking folderol seems, judging from the museum website, to have gotten a pruning.

What’s next in the two-artist fandango? Whistler’s Grandma? That would be “the first ever exhibition gathering the work of James McNeill Whistler and Grandma Moses, probing the early, fascinating, though disparate signs of climate change in foggy Victorian London and snowy southwestern Vermont.” Or Pablo and Norman: Perfect Together? I’d love to see “the first-ever exhibition uniting Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Norman Rockwell’s scenes of everyday life and chronicling conflicting responses to dramatic change in small towns in Vermont and the Basque Country in the 1930s and 1940s.” Every day seems like a full moon now, so I wouldn’t say “never to be seen” about either.