Shipwrecks and Homer at the Art Museum (1st review)

The Art Museum's "Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and The Life Line" is a two-fer: both an art show celebrating one segment of the work of a great American master, and a cultural history lesson that examines 19th-Century America's fascination with disasters and its celebration of hairbreadth escapes from them.

The Life Line is a great big Pullman Loaf of a painting— a real Steven Spielberg movie on canvas. (More on that below.) But Homer started out as a pencil-journalist during the Civil War, and in his preparatory study for the painting he highlighted the resolute face of the rescuer, as well as the comely but unconscious face of the woman being rescued.

In the finished oil, curiously, the rescuer's face is obscured by a blowing red scarf or shawl, thus turning him into Everyman. The effect is more dramatic but also more alienating. We don't really know the rescuer, so we can hardly identify with him.

Dismantled ship

The exhibit proper begins with a selection of shipwreck scenes from various 18th- and 19th-Century sources. Visitors will find paintings, engravings and even illustrated books. William Trost Richards's Shipwreck depicts the aftermath of the disaster, while Edward Moran's Shipwreck shows it as "a work in progress," with tossing spars, tossing men and the dismasted ship itself rising like a great wounded beast. If this were music, it would be a tone poem by Liszt.

A smaller exhibit space, labeled "Clear Sailing," concerns itself with Nature's more affable side. Here we find several Homer watercolors of ships peacefully at anchor, and we get a dose of 19th-Century sentimentality in a pair of works by Henry Bacon. Goodbye is practically damp with the emotion of leave-taking.

Another name for the show might well have been "Rescue Me," since scenes of peril and deliverance figure so prominently. They don't even all concern rescues at sea. There are prints of daring firemen rescuing people from burning buildings, and Charles Deas's 1847 oil, Prairie on Fire, depicts a gallant horseman rescuing yet another distressed damsel from the titular terror.

The rescue's the thing

The exhibit even includes monumental urns depicting natural disasters. Nineteenth-Century folks who possessed sufficient wealth to surround themselves with monumental painted urns and works of art— as well as their poorer relations who had to make do with chromolithographs—apparently lived in constant dread of natural catastrophes. No wonder Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii was such a popular piece of fiction!

Of course the key here is that you want to see the endangered people rescued, not drowned or burnt to a crisp. A short documentary on display celebrates the founding and the achieving of the U.S. Life Saving Service. The elaborate 19th Century lighthouses that survive, such as the one on Block Island, still pay tribute to the lengths to which our by our ancestors went to preserve lives when most long-distance travel was by sea, with all of its attendant perils.

Exhaustion and fear

At last we reach the inner sanctum of the exhibition where we get to see The Life Line itself. As I said before, this is the artwork equivalent of a summer blockbuster. Its composition is such that you're immediately pulled into the central drama of two figures— one of them supine from exhaustion or fear— suspended above the waters of a raging sea by the thinnest of made-made contrivances, a bit of rope, the "life line."

Paired with it are Homer's aforementioned preparatory drawing, an engraving of the image and a slightly altered version of the composition, now called Saved.

Also on display are several works inspired by Homer's stay in an English coastal village. His large-scale watercolor, The Wreck of the Iron Crown, may depict the disaster that actually inspired Homer's later painting.

A large and picturesque oil painting, The Coming of the Gale, depicts the hardy courage of those who live on the sea's bounty. Here Homer depicts a mother bearing her child as she anxiously scans the horizon for a sign of her loved ones.

Homer's answer to Monet

In the final galley we see a selection of Homer marines— oil paintings and watercolors, most of which depict the endless battle between the raging surf and the rock-bound coast of Maine. This is Homer's version of Monet's water-lily paintings, and like the Monets several of them take on an almost abstract quality.

Also on display is watercolor titled Sharks or, alternately, The Derelict. This is a preparatory sketch for Homer's great late work, The Gulf Stream, which serves as an anodyne to The Life Line. In place of the earlier work's optimism and kinetic energy, The Gulf Stream (unfortunately not included in the show, but represented here by a small reproduction) concerns the ennui of despair. Whether the circling sharks or the approaching waterspout reach the unfortunate fisherman trapped aboard his disabled boat first, he's still dead.

But ending on a hopeful note, the large 1896 Homer oil, The Wreck, depicts not a disaster unfolding, but a resolute band of Life Servers preparing to spring into action. The disaster has already occurred; now, salvation is at hand.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.