Winslow Homer: “Lost in the Grand Banks”
I keenly anticipated the Metropolitan Museum’s current Winslow Homer retrospective. Titled “Cross-Currents,” it comprises 88 oils and watercolors, a 200-page scholarly catalogue, a “visiting guide,” an audio guide, and docents readily at hand. The driving aspiration is to newly frame a major nineteenth century American painter, with due regard for our current wrestlings with issues of American purpose and identity.
In short – it is a necessary exercise in curating the American past, something our museums do and our orchestras do not.
As I write in Dvorak’s Prophecy, cities (I mention Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh) whose art museums “regularly scrutinize the American cultural narrative” host orchestras innocent of this endeavor. And I specifically cite a 2018 Metropolitan Museum exhibit tracing the lineage of the painter Thomas Cole, adding:
“Were an orchestra to do something similar, it might be a contextualized presentation of the symphonies of John Knowles Paine (1875, 1879) – crucial progenitors of the American-sounding Second and Third Symphonies of George Chadwick. I would not call Paine a ‘great composer.’ But he is a great and necessary figure in the history of American classical music. American orchestras do not even know him.”
Were an American orchestra to “do something similar” to the Met’s Winslow Homer retrospective, it would be a celebration of our greatest symphonist: Charles Ives, whose 2024 Sesquicentenary is nearly upon us. Will anything like that take place? There is a tool kit at hand: the “Brevard Project” this July. It’s a week-long think tank/seminar exploring the ways American orchestras can “use the past” to serve the nation and reinvigorate their mission..
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Devouring the Winslow Homer galleries, I was impelled to recall the 1895 Civil War oration of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., with the immortal words: “Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.”
Self-made, virtually self-taught as a painter, Homer (1836-1910) apprenticed to a commercial lithographer at nineteen and became a frequent illustrator for Harper’s Weekly and Ballou’s Pictorial. He was all of 25 years old when the Civil War erupted. He became its most memorable painter. This singular apprenticeship “touched with fire” powered his destiny with gathering force. He seized the elemental – and, with his signature seascapes, became the recorder of man at war with his surroundings in an indifferent world. Many an iconic Homer canvas shows sailors at the mercy of a sullen sea. At the Met, I was galvanized by the existential power of “Lost in the Grand Banks” (1885), with its brooding and featureless gray sky.
The trope of the self-invented, self-made American artist figures prominently in Dvorak’s Prophecy. I apply it to Walt Whitman, Hermann Melville, and – most especially – to Ives. It connects to something as “unfinished” as the United States itself. The Met’s Homer retrospective documents years of renewal, but also – at least to my eyes – pronounced terminal decline. My impression is that his lack of formal technical training ultimately became a source of limitation.
Many years ago, an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum cruelly juxtaposed the watercolors of Homer and John Singer Sargent. Homer was proud of his watercolors, and justly so. But Sargent’s command of this treacherous medium was sovereign. As a technician, he disclosed a virtuosity beyond Homer’s reach.
Seizing the Civil War, grappling with man’s war with the elements, Homer was an artist whose themes sometimes exceeded his means. And Sargent’s means can surpass his themes. It is in the music of Charles Ives – music still under-performed and under-recognized – that great American themes and uncanny, idiosyncratic means jostle in a wondrously dynamic equilibrium.
The Ives Sesquicentenary seems to me a make-or-break moment for our struggling orchestras.
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