In the Met’s Crosscurrents Show, Great Homers Can’t Hide Shoddy Scholarship

It’s a nice treasures show, but its imperialism, racism, and colonialism themes aren’t justified.

I saw Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this week, on the very day it closed. It’s a survey of Homer’s career, and it had so many wonderful things. Aside from this, it’s pointless, unless drawing a crowd is the Met’s purpose these days, and it’s incoherent. It’s an abuse of the Met’s stature, which means its borrowing power. Homer (1836–1910), like every great artist, is forever solicitous of new takes. Crosscurrents flirts with one or two but, given it’s more or less a seascape show, never takes the plunge. Intellectually, it’s a failure.

Today and Saturday, I’ll write on Crosscurrents. I was the director of one museum, the Addison Gallery, with lots of Homer watercolors and three exceptional paintings, and the curator of American art at the Clark, which owns ten Homer paintings and a group of watercolors. Homer studies and Thomas Eakins studies are still the anchors of advanced American art-history study, so Homer is a language common to all specialists in the field.

First, the positive. Not since the Homer retrospective in 1996 have I seen so many of Homer’s biggest hits. Crosscurrents’ raison d’être is The Gulf Stream, from 1899, which the Met owns. Other Met Homers are there as well — Prisoners from the Front, The Veteran in a New Field, and Snap the Whip. Plus Yale’s Old Mill (The Morning Bell), Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) from the National Gallery, The Life Line from Philadelphia, Undertow from the Clark, and Eight Bells and Kissing the Moon from the Addison. The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston sent their late seascapes, which are the best Homers they own. Cape Trinity, Saguenay River, Moonlight, from 1904, a nocturne, is from the Minneapolis Institute of Art and was worth the visit in itself. It’s the spookiest of Homer’s paintings.

Crosscurrents had 87 objects. By my count, 44 were watercolors. The things on view were mostly top-notch, with a few fizzlers. With all this great art, what could possibly go wrong? A lot. The show covers too much with too little depth. We don’t learn much that’s new about The Gulf Stream. Some meaty new ideas, taunted and tempted, aren’t developed. The beautifully illustrated catalogue, up to the Met’s high production values, adds very little to Homer scholarship.

Let’s start with the introductory panel, though it’s really an introduction to an introduction to an introduction after an introduction, leading to a morass. First, The Gulf Stream is the inspiration for the show, we’re told. Second, Homer worked in “a crucible of struggle.” Third, he painted rural life, churning seas, heroic rescues, and “formerly enslaved people,” who used to be “ex-slaves,” but “enslaved people” sounds more theatrical. Fourth, the Gulf Stream is an Atlantic Ocean phenomenon, so it’s about the Atlantic as well. Homer’s to be found working in Maine, Virginia, New York, the Caribbean, and the North Sea, all Atlantic venues, sort of.

The painting is about nature, mortality, and imperialism, too. “By reconsidering Homer’s dramatic pictures in the context of the Atlantic world,” we’re told, “this exhibition encourages a deeper understanding of his full body of work, sophisticated artistry, and ability to distill challenging issues for diverse audiences, then and now.” That’s a lot of big topics. An exhibition about everything is a show about nothing.

The Gulf Stream is and isn’t the first thing we see when we walk into the galleries. Its placement inadvertently warns us that every time a point of serious substance is ripe to be explored in depth, the curators decide this is a bridge too far and move to some other point to be treated as superficially.

The Gulf Stream is a very famous painting. It depicts a powerfully built black man, bare-chested, lying on the deck of a boat whose mast was destroyed, presumably in a storm. The boat bobs in an agitated sea. In the distance, in the right corner, is a twister. In the left corner, also in the distance, is a ship heading left. In the foreground are at least four sharks.

The introductory panel is on a wall on the right. In front of us there’s a freestanding wall with a big rectangle cut from it. Through the open rectangle, 50 or so feet in the distance, we see The Gulf Stream. It looks good from a distance, but it always feels isolated, as if it’s an afterthought. Once we get to it, the picture looks like no one knows what to do with it.

We’re first sent to two small paintings: Sharpshooter, from 1863, and Defiance, Inviting a Shot before Petersburg, from 1864. Inviting a Shot shows a Confederate soldier standing on a barricade. They introduce a section called “Civil War and Reconstruction.” Sharpshooter depicts a man with a gun perched in a tree. “What happened to the Atlantic Ocean?” I asked myself. With a dollop of Vermont eloquence, I replied, “Beats me.”

Homer’s career spanned 50 years, from the late 1850s, when he was a brilliant young magazine illustrator, to his grand, primeval paintings of ocean waves crashing against Maine’s rocky coast, most done after 1900, when he was an old man.

He painted croquet-playing women, Civil War combatants, childhood games, high-drama rescue scenes, hunters on the hunt, men after fish, Adirondack tourists, and ducks under fire. He is part of the Hudson River School and descended from the landscape and seascape tradition of Turner and Constable. He’s a 20th-century artist, too, and an inspiration to Bellows, Marin, Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, and many others. That’s Homer in a nutshell.

Sharpshooter and Inviting a Shot are two of Homer’s earliest Civil War pictures. These and Prisoners from the Front and The Veteran in a New Field are deployed to do the impossible: convey the Civil War generally and Homer’s Civil War specifically as an introduction.

Aside from the immensity and complexity of these issues, Prisoners from the Front and The Veteran in a New Field are big-enchilada paintings, not only for Homer studies but in the history of American art. The catalogue for Crosscurrents barely considers them. And no Atlantic Ocean in sight, not even a sea breeze or a seagull.

Here the show sabotages itself. Homer’s fame and, more essential, his foundation as an artist in the 1850s until the 1870s rest on his work as an illustrator for Harper’s magazine. Homer was the premier illustrator for a family of periodicals that functioned together as Time, CNN, Vanity Fair, and whatever suits your fancy as quality bourgeois-lifestyle and news outlets. He was his day’s version of our newspaper and magazine photographer or TV cameraman, part Annie Leibovitz, part Dorothea Lange, part Weegee.

Using the painting version of Sharpshooter was a terrible idea. Homer’s depiction of a sharpshooter hidden in a tree, pulling the trigger of his telescopic rifle to kill a faraway target, is best seen not in this 1863 painting but in its original, 1862, black-and-white Harper’s print version. That version is stark and direct. It’s a “you are there” scene, and since the viewer is holding a news journal as he sees it, his goal is looking for news. He’s looking for immediacy. He is reading Harper’s to learn what’s happened.

Sharpshooter is the first step in defining Homer. In almost every Homer, sometimes obviously, sometimes cryptically, there’s a story that’s immediate and conveyed in a documentarian, “you are there” way. His work is often about moments. They’re stories that change by the instant or hang in the balance. In Sharpshooter, Homer presents us with the ultimate moment. In a split second, after the subject pulls the trigger, someone, a mystery man, is going to be dead. And we’re a witness.

Homer called sharpshooting “near to murder.” Sharpshooters weren’t new to warfare but in the Civil War the practice was formalized and widely used. His scene was radical at the time because it drained the heroics and courage from battle. Sharpshooters hunted men like prey, reducing them to animals.

Color and the texture of paint makes Sharpshooter lush. They’re distractions. The painting, Homer’s first, was an experiment. Homer, more or less a self-taught artist, conceptually took his 1862 illustration and filled the white space with color.

Homer created hundreds of illustrations, produced as wood engravings, and these were his calling card well into the 1870s. If Crosscurrents is happy to be a glib, though bungling, survey of Homer, leaving the illustrations out is negligence. His years in the news business inform his image-making in his paintings. Homer learned the value of essentials, or he started with a knack for pictorial economy and honed it, mastered it, and deployed it like no one else.

Homer started painting watercolors in 1873 because he liked their immediacy. Working on the spot and not in a studio, he could capture appealing motifs as he saw them. Watercolor is a natural extension of his genius for the moment developed over years working in the news business.

I’m inflicting this primer on Homer the newsman in a helpful spirit, though a wistful, might-have-been one. The Met’s decision makers, and I mean Dan Weiss, the president, and Max Hollein, the director, have many, many curatorial mouths to feed. The Met’s curators are the most talented in their fields, and most are ambitious. They want to do exhibitions with publication credits. Even the Met, with an endowment of more than $4 billion, has a budget, and its galleries for exhibitions are limited.

I don’t know whether or not this is a new Met policy, but curators certainly have a better shot at getting a green light for their exhibition ideas if these ideas involve racism, gender, American imperialism, colonialism, diversity, inclusion, inequity, or grievance. Crosscurrents touches on many of these, sometimes using lingo, sometimes clumsy allusions, rarely facts, occasionally circumstantial evidence.

Had the exhibition centered on Homer’s work for news and lifestyle journals, it would have had a shot at establishing that he had a significant degree of interest in current events. I think, in making its case, the curators needed to overcome all the evidence showing that Homer was apolitical. He has nice things to say about underdogs once in a while, but he wasn’t focused on the events of the day.

After the Civil War and Reconstruction section, there’s a section on Homer and children where Snap the Whip is displayed. I have no idea why this section is in the show.

A big section on Homer’s rescue scenes displays fantastic things, but they’re so fantastic and so important that they overwhelm us. They compete with the rest of the exhibition rather than contribute to a linear narrative that, like a good drama, builds.

Homer painted The Gulf Stream in 1899. The Spanish-American War happened over four months in 1898. Homer had taken winter vacations in the Bahamas and Florida off and on since the early 1880s. He painted dozens of watercolors while he was there. Many are in the show. A few depict black men, women, and children — the locals — in scenes of everyday life. Crosscurrents wants to be a show about racism and colonialism, but this is a stretch as big as the Gulf Stream itself.

One watercolor, A Garden in Nassau, from in 1885, “celebrates the lush, verdant landscape while also suggesting the exclusion of Black islanders from aspects of Bahamian society.” It depicts a black child standing near a whitewashed wall with flowering trees growing in the background. In Native Hut in Nassau, also from 1885, Homer “aestheticized the structural racism and economic difficulties of Black Bahamians” by emphasizing the cottage’s thatched roof, flower garden, and coconut tree.

Homer did a watercolor closeup of a winning bird beside his dead opponent after a cockfight. “Could Homer have intended the watercolor to symbolize the power struggle over Cuban independence?” A label asks the question but won’t answer it. Sponge Fishermen, Bahamas is “picturesque but not critical and reveals no hint of arduous conditions or meager wages,” as though the Met’s curators are experts in the economics of sponge-fishing. Black turtle hunters are engaged in work “associated with empire.” One watercolor “hints at complicated imperial forces.” The Bather, from 1899, depicts young black men swimming in the sea. “Inherent in the image is a tension related to racial politics and class disparities.”

On and on we go. By ignoring Homer’s work in the news industry, the exhibition missed a foundational chance to establish and then develop Homer’s interest in world events and national politics. Not to be the piranha at the PC beach-blanket bingo, but the show’s attachment to penumbras and emanations doesn’t work without this. Homer had an eye for placing hot images with hot stories, but the case needs to be made that he had an opinion.

I looked at Homer’s Caribbean watercolors and didn’t see, in the presence or absence of motifs, any interest on Homer’s part in colonialism, Cuban independence, black Bahamian home economics, the justice in Teddy Roosevelt’s run up San Juan Hill, or turtle imperialism. I see an artist focused, as most artists are, on form, color, compositional challenges, and the capacities of whatever medium they’re using.

I’m not saying that colonialism, racism, and imperialism don’t figure in Homer’s work. I’m stating what, for scholars, should be obvious but isn’t. When it comes to art, silence is rarely complicity. Homer paints what attracts him, which could be new colors, funky diagonals, bodies in water, which is something you won’t see in Maine, and tropical foliage. Homer is not the social reformer and muckraker Jacob Riis. We shouldn’t wish he were. That’s not how art history works. And slapping terms such as “racism,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” on a work of art or an artist isn’t enough. Sayin’ it doesn’t make it so. We need evidence. We can’t take an abstraction like “public opinion” and impute it to Homer. He’s his own thing.