Winslow Homer the Painter, We Knew — but an Etcher, Too?

The Portland Museum of Art does another important Homer show, but it’s still stuck in fake oppression ideology.

I always enjoy visiting the Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Maine, in good and not-so-good times, and the museum is experiencing both. Its summer exhibition, Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher, is the first look at Homer’s etchings and their links to his paintings. I loved it and learned a lot. On the dark side, its $100 million expansion seems to have stalled, my spies tell me, because of sluggish fundraising. The museum and the architect, LEVER Architecture — based in Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles — developed a plan for a good-looking addition that would marginalize the ugly main building, built in 1983 and looking the worse for wear.

The new building will be “carbon-free,” a huge waste of money. It’ll also draw from the “worldviews” of the Wabanaki tribes of which crunchy Portlanders are enamored, absurdly so. LEVER describes itself as a firm that “stands up for racial and social justice and works to disrupt the systems that perpetuate inequality.” Lord, help us, or I should say help the museum. For my home, I draw from the worldviews of me, and I don’t fancy wigwam-living, spearing fish, canoe travel, or museums evoking them.

Alas, I’m merely the critic and not the client here. Last week the museum opened a temporary outdoor pavilion designed by LEVER to host rotating installations and performances and film screenings. What’s this all about? The timing is odd, since just about now coastal Mainers are moving from light and airy summer wear to bearskin hats, layers of flannel, and boots with cleats. Portland gets raw and cold fast. And, of course, starting in three weeks, it’ll be dark by four. The pavilion’s materials will be recycled into the addition, I read, but it seems like a PR stunt and meant to show that the big project will actually happen. It probably will — they need the space.

The pavilion sits — and the addition will sit — where an 1830 Georgian Revival pile housed Maine’s Children’s Museum until the PMA controversially demolished it last year. The move — bulldozing a historic site — raised an immense ruckus. The museum argued that the poor building, which did look like Tara, needed to face the wrecking ball because, among other reasons, Georgian Revival is a “white supremacist” style. That, I thought, was the dumbest thing I heard in 2024.

And in 2023 the PMA made an abortion of its very good collection of American historical art, rich in work by Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, George Bellows, and Frederic Church. Funded by the Hate America crowd at the Terra, Mellon, and Ford Foundations, Passages in American Art reframes its American things in the shadow of Maine’s very tiny slave economy, gone by statehood in 1820, and, of course, the Wabanaki. I wrote that it was both half-assed and half-baked and should be taken down — blot on land, sea, sky, and intelligence that it is. It’s still on view, though, only until January 1. Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanza, and Thank You, Great Spirit.

Now, to Homer (1836–1910). When I was in school, he and Eakins anchored American-art studies. I was a curator and director at museums heavy on Homer, and I consider him our master artist. He’s quintessentially New England, but he resonates everywhere for his breadth, eye for enigma, and rugged style and attitude. He was our eminent painter, watercolorist, and newspaper and magazine illustrator, but what about his etchings? They’ve been seen as mere derivatives of paintings such as Eight Bells, Undertow, and The Life Line. Yes, his etchings were sidelines and versions aimed at a broader market, and they were limited to the last half of the 1880s but, we learn and see, they were still intense creative enterprises of their own. Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher tells the story.

I never thought of Homer as part of the etching revival that Delacroix and Whistler started, but there he is, around 1887, producing boutique etchings of The Life Line, his epic rescue painting from 1884. It’s High Victorian drama. The hero, his face covered by a red scarf, hauls to safety a young woman, fainted and prone, via a pulley contraption from a capsized ship. We see a bit of her legs — okay, she’s in extremis, so that’s allowed — and her bosom is pressed to his body. We see his meaty hands and big foot — he’s strapping — and bits of his torso. The two figures are set against what was to become Homer’s signature storm-tossed sea. After, say, the mid-1890s, he rarely does figures. His late work is mostly a roiled sea and monster waves crashing against ragged cliffs. In The Life Line, the sea is mighty angry. Will the pulley hold? Lives hang in the balance.

Homer hoped that etched versions would be moneymakers. For The Life Line, he fussed. He cropped the scene to make the action compressed. He added drypoint for dense, black, velvety lines that contrast with the thinner, buoyant etched lines. À la Whistler, he used tone. Over two or three years, he and his printer experimented with different color inks. Some impressions are gauzier, some crisper.

There weren’t many impressions, a couple hundred, and Homer paid attention to every impression. Each impression is a little different. A group of Life Line etchings shows how different techniques and ink colors made for different looks. Each of Homer’s six etching projects is represented. Undertow from the Clark Art Institute and Eight Bells from the Addison Gallery, two showstopper paintings, are in the exhibition, too.

By no means was Homer unused to the graphic line or to the printed work of art. Far from it. Through the 1860s and into the 1870s, he was America’s foremost illustrator. He supplied hundreds of works for Harper’s and its spinoffs. These illustrations, though, were wood engravings. These started with Homer’s detailed drawing transferred to a woodblock, usually end-grain boxwood, maximally hard so the image, though very linear with no tone, can still support fine detail. Mass-media illustration — a magazine to be flipped through rather than contemplated — meant that the picture had to be easy to grasp, with depth or nuance compacted. Etching was meant for nuance, complexity, and also atmosphere. To make his etchings more collectible, he and his printer devised a remarque, which was a small symbol or monogram — Whistler’s was a butterfly — usually on a corner of the print or on the  margin. The remarque promoted differences among versions of each etching project.

Homer found that his profit was too tiny, though he enjoyed the new technical challenge. By the early 1890s he’d dropped etchings and begun to focus instead on dazzling late watercolors of rainbow trout and Caribbean scenes and his seascape paintings, brazen in showing the eternal battle between sea and land as they met on Maine’s coast just south of Portland at Prouts Neck, where Homer lived most of the year.

Silly me, I didn’t know that Homer did lithographs, too, or, better said, he allowed a handful to be done. The North Woods is in the exhibition, done in 1896 and based on a watercolor he’d done in 1884 that Louis Prang, the pioneer mass-market lithographic printer, bought. Lithographs are mass-produced prints that have the dash and freedom of drawings or watercolors. Think Toulouse Lautrec’s dancehall posters. They’re tricky. They’re usually a collaboration between the artist, who is the creative talent and draftsman, drawing with a greasy crayon or a pencil on a lithographic stone, and the specialist printer, who prepares the stone, deals with the medium’s difficult chemistry, and runs — and owns — the printing press. Etching and engraving involve lines on metal, and these lines wear. But lithographs can be printed in endless quantities.

Prang did a lithograph based on The North Woods on spec. He sent a proof — probably the one in the exhibition — to Homer, who loved it. It didn’t go forward, though. Homer was past 60 at that point and focused on valedictory themes. He might not have cared much at that point about expanding his audience. Maybe he thought that Prang, the inventor of the Christmas card, was trying to move his work into the realm of kitsch.

The exhibition is a new twist on Homer. It could have been too technical and esoteric, but the storytelling’s clear, the art is gripping, and the addition to Homer scholarship is a good one. The catalogue is great, with good essays by the curator, Ramey Mize, and also Judith Walsh and Michael Leja. It’ll be the standard source on Homer etchings. For the exhibition, I would have dropped the many wood engravings on view since the show focuses more on Homer’s etching technique and the etching marketplace. It might be insider baseball, but the public can take it. Americans love knowing how things are made and then sold.

I walked through the museum visiting favorite objects. Bernard Langlais’s wood sculptures, Christopher Patch’s papier-mâché birds, a Steichen nocturne, Hartley’s On the Beach, Thomas Moran’s Lotus Eaters, and Lois Dodd’s Neighbor’s House in the Snow. Columbus Bagged and Bound was on view in a gallery of marble sculptures, most High Victorian, life-size depictions of Jochebed, Moses’s mother, and Penelope, Odysseus’s wife. Benjamin Akers’s Dead Pearl Diver, General Grant, and a polar bear by Anna Hyatt Huntington are favorite marbles as well.

Columbus Bagged is a marble bust made in 2023 by Aaron Stephan, new to the museum. It depicts Christopher Columbus wrapped with a white garbage bag cinched with rope. Imprisoning him this way evokes, I read, “social justice movements,” meaning the mass attack of envy, ignorance, vanity, and languor starting around 2020. Columbus, the museum suggests, can’t or won’t be “fully removed from our accounts of history” as a “hero who supposedly discovered America.” He’s in a liminal state, still a hero but a toxic one. The sculpture of Grant is placed so his back is turned on Columbus, not that he’d notice, since he’s also wrapped up in a bag.

Columbus Bagged isn’t a bad work of art at all. Stephan is Portland-based and wryly looks at subjects provoking wildly disparate opinions. Too bad the curator is so sloppy. Children were taught that “Columbus discovered America,” and, by the way, Happy Columbus Day, a few days late. It’s more correct and adult-worthy to say that Columbus discovered the sea routes opening trade, travel, and conquest in the Western Hemisphere by Spain and, before long, Portugal, France, and England. It’s safe to say that he was he was a deeply knowledgeable seaman, cartographer, and astronomer as well as an adventurer nonpareil.

The PMA’s next two exhibitions are Holding the Light: Contemporary Wabanaki Photography and a retrospective of the work of feminist artist Sascha Braunig. She’s a contemporary Surrealist — I’m not sure what “feminist” means for her. I’m curious about the exhibition since she’s a very good artist. The Wabanaki photographers show, based on preview selections, seems promising — there’s a cyanotype in the mix, and I love cyanotypes. Calling the work “Wabanaki photography” puts it in a birdcage and deprives the art of universality and the artists of boundary-breaking. The curator seems to want them stuck on the creative reservation.

The museum’s got Wabanaki on the Brain, a boutique infirmity. At one point, it hired an Indigenous “sensitivity” staffer — there’s wampum in oppressed living — and it seems to be jettisoning an exhibition program that was varied, edgy, and high on hidden quality. Only about 2 percent of Mainers consider themselves Native American, with a scant 5,000 living on reservations in the state.