Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents by Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents by Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount
• Jan Garden Castro (bio)

winslow homer: crosscurrents
Stephanie L. Herdrich and Sylvia Yount
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Distributed by Yale University Press)
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9781588397478/winslow-homer/
200 pages; Cloth, $50.00

Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents, the catalog for the exhibition traveling to the National Gallery, London (10 September 2022–8 January 2023), underscores the show's point: Homer applied his powerful painting prowess and narrative talent to capture both ocean and societal crosscurrents. Sylvia Yount terms this his "lifelong concerns with race and the environment." Yount is the Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her colleague Stephanie L. Herdrich, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture in the American Wing, closes the volume by discussing how the artist framed race, class, and gender disparities as he painted nature's magnificence and its destructive force. The Gulf Stream, an 1899 painting reworked by 1906, is the show's centerpiece, displaying a lone Black man adrift at sea in a boat with a broken mast, surrounded by sharks. Homer used the sea literally and metaphorically in an age following the Civil War and Reconstruction, when Jim Crow laws and racist violence marginalized and endangered the Black populace.

Herdrich's essay, "Crosscurrents: Conflict, Nature, and Mortality in Winslow Homer's Art," dives into the vortex of this exhibition and painting as she quotes curator H. Barbara Weinberg's comment that The Gulf Stream and other paintings "seem to ask as many questions as they answer." The same could be said about this exhibition and catalog. Experts mention Homer's one month of classes in the Barbizon style in New York and mostly speculate about the rest of his art education. Even though Homer's father and brother [End Page 149] are mentioned and seem central to his life, readers learn almost nothing about Homer's family or friends. We are sent to footnoted sources if we're curious about whether he had any romantic relationships. Similarly, we are told that the water currents of the Atlantic are central to Homer's body of work but given only general information that Homer's knowledge of this body of water came from oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury and was filtered through a religious source, George Chaplin Child, who believed in divine providence. Ocean patterns are discussed only as they were historically understood in 1857. Herdrich's best discussion of currents is in her consideration of The Herring Net (1885), where she points out "the inherent dangers of fishing the Grand Banks, the rich waters southeast of Newfoundland, where the cold Labrador Current meets the relatively warm Gulf Stream." The authors do not update Maury's notions of how ocean currents operate. Readers are left to their own resources to update this by factoring climate change into Homer's portraits of land and sea and to ponder, as Homer did, how humans variously interact with nature and how race, class, gender, and north-south cultural differences were also crosscurrents.

Herdrich delves into how Homer took years to finalize The Gulf Stream. Using elements of sharks and a boat disaster he had painted in 1885, he added more menacing sharks. In the final composition, the sugarcane from the sketches is more central and sharks more numerous and menacing, without going as far as the 1885 watercolor showing sharks circling a tipping, now-empty boat. There is no discussion of the use of threatening, open-mouthed sharks as a symbol in earlier art. According to Adelheid M. Gealt, emerita professor specializing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century iconography, a J. S. Copley 1778 painting with an open-mouthed shark alludes to Rubens's 1618 Jonah and the Whale. Hopeful signs in Homer's painting are a possible rescue ship on the far horizon and word links to family and America—the boat is named Anna, and its port of origin is Key West.

In 1899, Homer revealed to a friend that he considered The Gulf Stream's figures "of about the same value to the picture" as those in J. M. W. Turner's...