Homing in on Homer`s distinctly American flair

LOS ANGELES - It has become the stuff of art folklore that Impressionism, the ultimate crowd-pleaser among movements, had to overcome the hostile reception of conservative critics in the 1870s. They just didn`t understand the stylistic revolution in the making.

But it would likely come as a surprise to most people that Winslow Homer - famed for his paintings of rural children, women strolling on hills or beaches, and men at sea - had no easier time with critics during this same decade.

His trials and travails in the press, which only intermittently recognized his greatness, convey a tale in the engrossing exhibition "Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s."

Margaret C. Conrads, who curated this show for Kansas City`s Nelson Atkins Museum, has clearly done her homework, and has managed to give her research a cogent form: She has put excerpts from reviews and commentary alongside the art, while framing the decade with lucid wall text about both Homer and his America.

The exhibition, now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, features 53 paintings. It covers only one period of Homer`s career (1867-1880), but it is a vital one - the years in which Homer set out to establish his importance as a painter. For all the criticism his pictures attracted, Homer also made paintings that struck chords with critics and the public. He was intimately involved with the notion of finding American subjects.

By the 1940s, influential champions saw him as quintessentially American. Lloyd Goodrich, the pioneering Homer biographer, curator and historian of American art, wrote, "He did for our painting what Walt Whitman did for our poetry - he made it native to our own earth and air." Until the late 1860s, however, the American public knew Homer as an illustrator. He had traveled to the front during the Civil War to bear witness through crisp engravings for Harper`s Weekly. Then, in 1866, he garnered prolific press for his painting "Prisoners From the Front," an ambitious canvas (not part of this show) in which the figures incisively embody the notions of democratic dignity on the Union side and arrogant rebellion on the Confederate side. The wrenching trauma of the Civil War triggered an intense search among artists and critics alike to locate what was particularly American about American art. This theme courses like a subcurrent through much of the art criticism, and this obsession prompts the show`s subtitle. Homer`s "Prisoners From the Front" fit the cultural bill. Homer captured the subject with a forthright, dignified approach, and the technical vigor of his style gathered praise, too. But it wasn`t to be quite that easy again for him until the 1890s, when his great seascapes from Maine elevated him to icon status.

As Conrads writes in her book-length exhibition catalog, "High, even unrealistic, expectations that intersected with the growing demand for America to have an identifiable national art plagued him, and often placed him at the center of controversy as well as praise."SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS

Today, one looks at a stunning picture such as "Crossing the Pasture" (1872) and wonders how commentators could overlook its splendors. Homer depicts a pair of boys in casually graceful poses. Homer was also a master at evoking light, and we can see why, simply by focusing on the white of the smaller youth`s shirt and the varied brown tones of the bigger one`s trousers and jacket. There is a simple elegance in how they stand in a meadow that stretches for a distance behind them and then blends into mountains. There is also a kind of tender bond between the boys, evident in how the smaller one leans against his companion and shares the handle of a gleaming bucket.

An anonymous reviewer for The New York Evening Post, though, didn`t find such virtues in "Crossing the Pasture." He thought it revealed a "disagreeable hardness." The painting also came under attack for having no story line - a looming criterion in American art circles of the 1870s that served as blinders. No one ever stopped to ask: Does it really need to tell a tale? Isn`t a great rendering of figures in a landscape enough. By the standards of our day, Homer is a realist. In his time, though, he wasn`t considered realistic enough.

In the first portion of the exhibition, there is a little gem of a landscape that Homer painted during a stay in France in 1866 and part of 1867, "Cernay la Ville - French Farm." Paint is loosely handled for land and sky, tightening at the horizon line into a set of buildings that becomes a tight group of cylindrical and block-like forms.

Clarence Cook, then the critic for New York`s Tribune, couldn`t fathom why Homer would take this approach.

"Nature is loyal to herself in Picardie as well as in New Jersey, Mr. Homer," Cook wrote, "and she couldn`t make a landscape like this even if she were to try."

Cook wasn`t alone. "Unfinished," "sketchy" and "incomplete" were common pejoratives thrown Homer`s way. Critics simply didn`t see that academic polish didn`t interest him; a style that evoked the immediacy and the eloquence of ordinary American life did.HOMER`S ODYSSEY

Much like Whitman, Homer was perceived to have genius, but condemned for employing his vision without the right amount of refinement and decorum. The point, with Homer as well as with Whitman, is not to laugh or scoff at their critics - though a few sound foolish enough to attract a chuckle or two - but to realize that some artists are truly ahead of their times. Refinement and decorum earned acclaim for legions of poets and artists that have since faded from view.

Cultural sages called for greater attention to American life, but gentility was still the order of the day. The beach scene in Homer`s "Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide)" is a thing of utter charm by today`s measure, yet not one of his stellar paintings: Three women loll along the shore while a dog looks on. But the scene disturbed some critics in 1870, because he presented women in new fashions that were considered decadent and because the women`s legs were bare. Stockings were proper attire, even on the beach.

The virtues of an American childhood was a big preoccupation in the 1870s. Tom Sawyer is the prime literary example, and Homer`s "Crack the Whip" (1872) is an equally lasting example of this 19th-century love affair with youth. Nostalgia for a more innocent age was one big reason for the preoccupation. The nation experienced mass carnage and a president`s assassination in the 1860s, and a decade later it was in the throes of rapid urbanization and industrialization. What could seem more appealing than the image of boys at play, with a one-room schoolhouse as a backdrop?

Critics adored the subject matter and yet chastised Homer for, as one review put it, "crudities and apparent carelessness of execution." Yet it is Homer`s style, with its attention to light and its surprisingly contemporary sense of color, that gives the painting a freshness that makes it seem as much a part of our time as his.

All of the 19th-century commentary was directed at Homer`s oil paintings. In watercolor, the same standards of finish didn`t apply. In fact, watercolor was new territory in American painting, and Homer became its seminal figure. It`s not hard to see why. Look at the dazzling shimmer of the water in "Three Boys in a Dory With Lobster Pots" (1875). Or, scrutinize "Waiting for Dad (Longing)" (1873) for how its simple structure meshes precisely with the poignant little drama of the picture. The boy sits atop the front end of the small boat, looking out to sea.

His studies of figures in watercolor can also be tightly rendered, wonderfully precise. A woman in an orange dress, seen in profile, contemplates the even more meticulously rendered elephant (carved or ceramic) on a table before her in a stunning 1877 picture.GENIUS AT ODDS In oils, too, Homer displayed a brilliant feel for seascapes. "Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)" (1875-76) is a phenomenal painting in every respect. The diagonals of the sails and figures form gentle counterpoints to the clean line of the horizon.

Homer was often criticized for his palette, but the use of color here - from the browns of the boat to the greens of the sea to the grays of the clouds - is calibrated as precisely as the lines of a perfect poem. You can practically hear the wood bobbing on the water, see the spray lifting into the air and smell the sea; Homer`s realism is far more attuned to this reality than the academic style that critics championed.

Even this painting, though, couldn`t totally please Earl Shinn, the critic for the Nation, who wrote, "It is impossible to deny Mr. Homer`s genius; it is equally impossible to be always satisfied with what he puts on canvas." This idea of a genius at odds with artistic convention surfaces almost continuously in commentary on Homer during this period. If he would just do this or do that, his detractors collectively declared, he would fulfill his promise.

Let`s be grateful he didn`t listen to his critics too often. His way of coping was to leave New York behind, settling in remote Prout`s Neck, Maine, in 1883. The sea became his major subject, and the culture caught up with him.

Unlike many enduring artists, Homer didn`t have to wait for death to have his greatness acknowledged. By the time he died in his studio in 1910, Homer had received gold medals at world fairs from Chicago to Paris, and major museums in France, as well as the United States, had acquired his work.

Enduring icons tend to transcend their time because their art speaks to us. Yet reliving the debate that surrounded Homer`s art isn`t simply an idle history lesson or a good gimmick for an exhibition. It enriches how we see his art, his life and his times. It also reminds us of the limitations of taste in any era.

(C) Copley News Service

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Author: Robert L. Pincus