Word: homer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, John Marin, Marsden Hartley--they all owed Homer something. His images of men, sea and mountain, and especially of women, were asexual, but that only made them more American, and saved them from the whiff of scandal that clung to Eakins. His mastery and fluency--in oil and especially in watercolor, which he was largely responsible for establishing as a serious medium in America--were the envy and secret despair of many an artist. The triumph of modernism after the 1930s, however, put Homer's reputation on the downgrade; he looked like an illustrator...
...anymore. If there is any single lesson to be learned from the great Homer retrospective that was seen in past months at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and that opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it's that Homer was not just a fine American painter but one of the great realist artists of the 19th century as a whole, comparable in achievement to Manet or Courbet, if not Degas. The show's curators, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, have brought enormous...
...Homer shows them learning skills (sailing, fishing, farm work) and getting their education in the schoolhouse. Henry James found Homer's "barefoot urchins and little girls in calico sun-bonnets...almost barbarously simple" and "horribly ugly," but conceded that they won you over: Homer "has resolutely treated them as if they were pictorial, as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier...he has incontestably succeeded." Homer was one of the key figures in whose work Americanness ceased to be an embarrassment. The cultural cringe before Europe vanishes and is replaced by a robust confidence in American...
...plane in Snap the Whip, 1872, brings to mind the dancing putti on Donatello's Cantoria in Florence. He had a knack for inserting distant echoes of the classical into the forms of common life, and doing it so subtly that you're scarcely aware of them at first. Homer went to London in 1881 and then settled in the village of Cullercoats on the coast, near Newcastle. He painted the fisherfolk: the men, massive in their rain-slicked oilskins, and the women mending nets and waiting on shore. The distended shapes of windblown clothes give these already robust female...
...spring of 1883, Homer shut down his New York studio and moved to Prout's Neck, a narrow strip of rock on the Maine coast. There he found himself a cottage overlooking the sea--a good place for a man whose four favorite words, a friend recalled, were "Mind your own business." He spent 27 years at Prout's Neck, relieved by excursions to New York and fishing trips to the Caribbean, Florida and the Adirondacks. Its steep, sea-gnawed granite ledges became the emblematic landscape of his finest work. No artist since Turner had painted the sea with such...