The Met’s Woke Winslow Homer Show Is a Waste

There are lots of new Homer ideas, but the Met went with tired, predictable, phony ones.

G reetings from Alabama. I’m here in Huntsville on a swing through the South leading to a wedding in Nashville. Yesterday, I visited the lovely Huntsville Museum of Art. Huntsville is a great town packed with first-rate antebellum architecture. It’s a lively cultural center, too. I’ve never been here and knew Huntsville only as a center for military missile research and manufacturing.

So many church spires and missiles, I’m not shy to say, are a comfort in these parlous times. Values are strong here. I spent an afternoon earlier in the week at the Birmingham Museum of Art. It’s an impressive, encyclopedic civic museum. The Deep South is renowned for elegant interiors and gracious living, so it’s no surprise to see that the museum has splendid decorative arts. I’ll write about both of these museums in the next few weeks.

I do want to revisit, painful as it is, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s insipid Winslow Homer exhibition, which just closed. I saw Crosscurrents on its last day. I haven’t seen so many great works by Homer (1836–1910) since his 1996 retrospective. The Met has enormous borrowing power, so it got its treasure trove of Homer’s finest oil paintings and watercolors. Alas, it turned Champagne and caviar into boring PC pablum.

The exhibition and book are driven by The Gulf Stream, painted by Homer in 1899. The exhibition calls it “one of his most complicated and consequential works.” I’d agree, but the curators, odd to say, skirt it. It’s a one-off picture, as they admit. It’s the only oil painting Homer did of a black Caribbean subject. Homer exhibited it a few times after he painted it.

It’s still a famous picture. In my childhood, in the misty netherworld of years long gone, The Gulf Stream was as close to universally known as a work of American art could be. Most people could describe it. A half-naked, football-built black man, supine on the deck of a wrecked boat, is at the mercy of the open seas. He lost his mast in a storm. The ocean’s still roiling. In the distance and foreground are omens of his future. Far off on the right is a twister. Far off on the left is a ship. In the foreground are sharks, and it’s close to lunchtime. Flecks of red in the water, otherwise a symphony of blues, suggest who’s on the menu. Stalks of sugar cane are on the deck.

What to make of this? The Met gives us the longest possible non-answer fake answer, starting with Homer’s Civil War pictures from the 1860s to his scenes of everyday childhood life and the lives of freed slaves in the 1870s, his High Victorian rescue pictures in the ’80s, his Caribbean watercolors in the ’90s, and his post-1900 Maine seascapes. Colonialism, imperialism, and racism are everywhere, we’re told, with words like “hints,” “it’s inherent,” “could be,” “aestheticized structural racism,” and “is it a coincidence?” But there’s a lot of wading in the water without the hard work of serious research and the ruthless self-questioning that art historians need to do. Just because we want something to be doesn’t make it so.

In studying The Gulf Stream, I’d start with the object, what Homer said about it, and the reception to it when Homer first showed it. Homer was asked once what the painting meant. He told a dealer friend “the subject of the picture is in the title” and, when asked what happened to the black man, said, “He returned to his friends and home & lived happily ever after.” The critical reception, and what we know about the public’s, wasn’t ecstatic.

Viewers felt it was melodramatic, and not in the best possible way. The Life Line, from 1884, and Undertow, from 1885, are women-in-danger paintings and forerunners of The Gulf Stream. The Life Line is a drama where the end’s unknown. Will the victim, fitted in a contraption and with a man savior by her side, get to safety? Her rescue seems iffy. In Undertow, the question is whether or not the two women are alive. The Gulf Stream, in my opinion, suffers from obviousness. The black man’s hopes seem dashed as the ship to the left, looking like a ghost ship, sails away while the twister seems to lean forward. And then we’ve got those sharks.

Homer can be caustic. It’s Yankee humor. “Lived happily ever after” might mean “you dolt, isn’t it obvious he gets eaten alive,” or it might mean “I’m not going to tip my hand,” which is an artist’s response. Artists like to keep things cryptic since they want their work debated. “The subject of the picture is in the title” might be another bit of Homer snark. Homer himself wasn’t satisfied with the painting. He kept fiddling with it. When The Gulf Stream was first exhibited, it didn’t show a ship in the distance. To assuage critics who thought it was too desolate, Homer added it.

The Gulf Stream is beautifully painted. Homer’s a wonder when it comes to roiling seas. I think this one is his best. He applied his paint both in sweeps and in dozens of dashes, swirls, zigzags. I think it’s more famous than fantastic, though. It took Homer a few years to sell it. The Met bought it, and I have to call it an early American example of what curators call a museum picture. It’s not for home decoration. It seems problematic and provocative. It’s idiosyncratic, too.

When the Met bought The Gulf Stream, the museum was 30 years old and hadn’t made buying American contemporary art a priority. Homer’s more-or-less obvious quotations from The Raft of Medusa, by Géricault, The Barque of Dante, by Delacroix, and Turner’s Slave Ship, which the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston bought in 1899, were probably designed to appeal to museums hesitant to buy new American art but persuadable if it had some European lineage.

“The Gulf Stream is about the Gulf Stream” seems elliptical but it exposes a Mariana Trench–size hole in the show. We never learn what the Gulf Stream is. There’s a wall mural depicting a map of the Atlantic Ocean from 1857. I’m a landlubber from Vermont — no Gulf Stream there — and I know the Gulf Stream explains why the weather in Northern Europe is more temperate than in its latitudinal counterparts in North America. I know the Gulf Stream starts south of Florida.

It explains, and here I’m getting over my head, why the water off the coast of Maine is so freakin’ cold, even in August.

I don’t know anything else about it. Homer says the picture is about the Gulf Stream. Its title is “The Gulf Stream.” Crosscurrents’ inspiration is The Gulf Stream. Get a meteorologist or an oceanographer to do the deep dive. Make the picture not only the inspiration for the show but the anchor.

This, of course, would mean dropping half the paintings in the exhibition, among them the Civil War, Reconstruction, and childhood works. It might not be a magnet for crowds drawn by the wealth of Homers, but at least Crosscurrents would be coherent.

That said, the topic’s been done. The Duke University historian Peter Wood wrote a book on The Gulf Stream almost 20 years ago in which he covered race, the Spanish-American War, Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” poem, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Caribbean sugar-labor economy. This makes the Met’s scholarship both insipid and stale. I’d add that Homer’s depictions of African Americans have been mined many times over the past 30 years.

An alternative, and I’m all for new ideas, is to focus on Homer and mortality. Fox Hunt, Right and Left, Kissing the Moon, The Wrecked Schooner, and Driftwood, Homer’s last painting, are already in the exhibition. These and other works by Homer, I’d offer, deal with death, infinity, and the end of life. They’re all end-of-life pictures in that Homer died in 1910, but, after, say, 1900, he understood he was indeed an old man whose friends, peers, and family from his generation were dying.

The Gulf Stream is about death and dying but also about the things that last. There’s a powerful force of nature like the Gulf Stream that’s immutable and eternal, and then there’s you, me, and the guy in the boat. Homer’s late seascapes, and there are eight in the show, concern not our mundane doings but rock and surf slugging it out as they’ve done for a million years. I don’t know what Homer’s view of the afterlife was, but his late work in the context of his view of death and the culture’s view is a new topic. An exhibition of this kind flirts with an artist’s faith, and an artist’s religion is usually taboo. Most art historians like to think of great artists as nonbelievers, but are they?

I don’t like finding fault with a Met show since it’s the greatest museum in the world and its curators are serious scholars. I have to say, though, that I hate the wall color. It’s too light, leaving many of the paintings looking like black holes. I think the curators and designers chose it because light wall colors look modern, and Crosscurrents isn’t so much about art circa 1900 as it is about matters du jour 2022. Best not have the galleries look too Victorian.

And my jaw dropped when I looked at the last gallery, Legacy. It’s filled with eight watercolors, which is bizarre. “Was this a watercolor show?” I wondered. The art seemed like the curators couldn’t fit it in anywhere else so it got dumped at the end in an unnecessary and soggy coda. Homer’s legacy is his foundational importance to American Modernism. He’s seminal to Maine Regionalism, which, even today, punches far above its weight. I know the two Clark watercolors in this section intimately, but I’d never seen Diamond Shoal, from 1905, and Woods at Prout’s Neck, from 1887. They’re from private collections and are gorgeous.

The catalogue is a very mixed bag. Daniel Immerwahr’s essay is mostly historical and contextual since the exhibition has to shoehorn Homer into an imperialist enterprise as if he were a mini-McKinley. “Homer can be seen as an advance scout for a country that would soon turn its gaze south,” he writes, referring to Homer’s Caribbean vacations. Homer’s not just there recovering from a frozen ass acquired in Maine. He’s there to “reconnoiter” in behalf of America’s quest for hegemony. I sigh in despair.

Not only is this dumb, but America’s gaze south of the border dates to Pinckney’s Treaty in 1795 between the new United States and Spain. This settled the border with Florida and guaranteed American navigation rights on the Mississippi. Cuba was a fevered dream among Americans from the 1820s, as was Mexico and South America. The collapse of Spanish rule created a dozen new, unstable countries with which Washington needed to reckon. Then there’s the Mexican War, which ended with Mexico’s acquiescence of land larger than the Louisiana Purchase. The Caribbean was always a point of interest.

Immerwahr makes an allusive rather than specific, detailed case for considering Homer’s Caribbean and Maine seascapes as a unit in which a race-infused, colonialist history of the Atlantic can be found. It doesn’t work. Yes, they are of a piece, but on matters of style and approach to form and color and, to an extent, content.

Christopher Riopelle’s essay on Homer’s two trips to Europe is good. Homer’s adventure in Cullercoats, England, has gotten lots of attention but not his trip to Paris. Citing Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans as an inspiration for Homer’s frieze of figures in Prisoners from the Front is far-fetched. Riopelle identifies Homer’s time in Paris as enigmatic. He was a tight Bostonian and, evidently, found little oh-là-là there. One artist Riopelle doesn’t discuss is Whistler. What did Homer get from Whistler’s minimalism and abstraction? Homer was in London when Whistler was Britain’s most famous and most controversial artist as well as the first American artist to be internationally known.

Gwendolyn Shaw looks at Homer’s African-American subjects from the Civil War, when his black Army-camp laborers have the look of a minstrel show, and from Reconstruction. Dressing for the Carnival, from 1877, a Met picture, is always worth another look. A Visit from the Old Mistress, from 1876, shows the lady of the manor and former slave-owner as she faces three once-enslaved, now free, black women, one holding a baby. It’s the ultimate in awkward moments and a great picture. I’m not sure I buy Shaw’s contention that Homer’s reliance on Michel Eugène Chevreul’s manual on color led to bad choices when he painted black skin. Sylvia Yount, one of the two Met curators of Crosscurrents, wrote a good essay on Homer historiography. Stephanie Herdrich’s essay most closely hews to the themes of the show.

This is the third unoriginal, rambling Met blockbuster I’ve reviewed in the past couple of years. The Alice Neel retrospective — the seventh in the past 30 years — revealed little new about this good-but-not-great portraitist. A close look at her pregnant nudes would have been original but, I think the Met leadership concluded, unmarketable.

The Medici show was a rehash of the Strozzi Palace’s Bronzino retrospective and, in a case of deceptive advertising, had little to do with the Medicis. I liked the Met’s exhibition about Disney and Rococo-era decorative arts. This had depth, originality, and beauty. It got the go-ahead, I presume, more for the presence of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella than for its Boulle mantle clock.

Once the Met leadership forced an admission charge on its board and regulators, it flirted with surrender to the gate. Now, the tariff is $30 a head, and the museum’s financial model depends on admissions revenue. An exhibition’s got to be a crowd-pleaser to happen. That’s a new thing for the Met and a very sad one. I think there’s a quality-control issue, too. Max Hollein, the director, is a contemporary-art specialist. Though all great living artists look, even study, the best in pre-1900 art, I’ve found that art historians focusing on the post-1945 period, as a rule, don’t know much about what came before.

Why does this matter, as long as the art in a show is great? It matters because great art shouldn’t be hauled across the country or world, in a truck, plane, or both, unless there’s a scholarly goal to be achieved. It’s a needless risk to the art, and it takes, in the case of Homers, what are likely to be among a museum’s icons from home audiences.

The Met, as I’ve said many times, more or less gets whatever loans it wants. Curatorially, there’s a culture at the museum of developing big wish lists, asking for everything, and then looking at what’s approved by lenders. Little is winnowed, though. This is one reason that Met shows are often obese.

Over 40 Homer watercolors are in Crosscurrents. Given their sensitivity to light, these watercolors are unlikely to travel soon or even to be displayed by their home institutions. Scholars with good, on-point, new scholarship about a Homer watercolor in the show might get a rejection letter in response to their deserving loan request because the Met has already hogged it for its undeserving show.

I’m glad I saw Crosscurrents since so many of Homer’s best were there. I’ve seen hundreds of Homer watercolors, but I’d never seen Coral Formation, from 1901, owned by the Worcester Art Museum, Rest, from 1885, The Wreck of the Iron Crown, from 1881, and How Many Eggs?, from 1873, all watercolors from private collections. Otherwise, what a waste.

The exhibition is traveling in reduced form to the National Gallery in London. I hope its specious, lame scholarship goes overboard during the crossing.