THE UNKNOWABLE SEA

WINSLOW HOMER, MAINE COAST, 1896

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Why is nineteenth-century American painting so boring? In art history, generalization is almost always falsification, but there appears to be a consensus among museum-goers that while nineteenth-century European painting is exciting, revolutionary, worthy of pilgrimage, American painters of the same era deserve to be relegated to rarely visited galleries in distant wings of museums. I have often heard visitors at the Met ask directions to Van Gogh or Monet, but I’ve never heard anyone say, "Where are your Thomas Coles?" or "I’m looking for the Frederic Edwin Church gallery." This neglect is partly justified. It’s easy to tire of Cole’s warmed-over Claudean landscapes and Albert Bierstadt’s freeze-dried mountains, and some nineteenth-century paintings only interest us because miniature versions of them were burned into our brains at an early age in the form of textbook illustrations. (Look! It’s Washington Crossing the Delaware! It’s so big!...It’s so boring.) One quickly concludes that American artists of a century and a half ago were too provincial, too much under the spell of tradition, of old European styles that Europe already considered passé. But the American 1800's did produce some world-class painters who were anything but provincial (Eakins, Homer, Whistler, Cassatt, Sargent) and other minor masters who deserve to be better known (Twachtman, Duveneck), so it’s with a mixture of sadness and pleasure that I hear my footsteps echo through the silent, deserted galleries in the Met’s American wing–sadness because no one else is here, pleasure because no one else is here to disturb me.

I came to study Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream, his well-known image of a lone black sailor adrift on a storm-ravaged boat in shark-ridden waters and stoically facing almost certain death. It’s a very good painting, deservedly famous, but as I sat looking at it in the intimate gallery space where Homer’s late works are hung, it failed to catch fire for me. For some reason, I couldn’t see the painting as anything more than a pictorial equivalent of American literary Naturalism, an illustration for a story Stephen Crane didn’t live to write. It was as if the younger Homer, the illustrator for Harper’s magazine, was impinging upon my enjoyment of the old man’s work. Why must there be so many sharks in the painting, so many flying fish drawn by blood on the waves? Why does Homer feel compelled to spell it all out for us and leave as little mystery as possible? The painting is as powerful as a sledgehammer, and about as subtle.

As my attention drifted away from The Gulf Stream, I began to notice the other canvases that surrounded me. Four of them were from the series of seascapes Homer painted during the last twenty years of his life at Prout’s Neck, Maine, and they looked like variations on a single theme. They are all coastal rocks and curling waves, crashing foam and shooting spray. They are wonderfully uninhabited, with no human or animal figures to distract us from a drama that is entirely the sea’s business. Their dark, unsentimental beauty belies their origin in the century and country of Cole and Bierstadt, and their masterful loose paint handling shows us that in a few decades Homer progressed from a magazine illustrator to a painterly realist who could stand toe-to-toe with Courbet.

Of the four paintings, Maine Coast (1896) is the most radical. Nothing could be simpler than Maine Coast. Only a typical work by Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman is superficially easier to describe. A wave rolls into shore, crashing against a group of dark foreground rocks already awash in white foam. At left, the wave bursts in a spectacular circular explosion. In the background distance, the sea grades to a high, hazy, often imperceptible horizon. That’s the subject; the interest is in the execution.

Homer applies paint to this canvas with all the controlled wildness of his late style. In the foreground he lays the white on thick with brush and palette knife, creating long, serpentine passages of white pigment that are almost enamel-smooth, like the thick paint surfaces in early Cézanne. The brightness, smooth texture and painterly freedom of these white streaks, set against more vigorously brushed areas, undermine the realistic representation of foam. This is as obviously paint as the painted flesh in a portrait by Lucian Freud. There’s a dramatic difference between this foreground, with its blocky, geometric blacks contrasting sharply with bright, flowing white, and the painting’s background, where the multicolored sea possesses a harmonious, almost Whistlerian beauty. The background resembles the work of any number of sea painters of the late 1800's, but the foreground is Modern with a capital M, looking forward to the twentieth-century Maine coastal paintings of Bellows and Hartley. With this contrast, this collision of styles, Homer seems to be enacting the death of decorative, tonal marine painting on the hard, unforgiving rocks of his realism.

Background and foreground, sea and stone, collide like matter and anti-matter, and the moment of their collision produces the painting’s most violent and exciting passage. This awesome explosion, this great, Dionysian, barrier-breaking burst of spray and foam, is a deliberately frenzied passage, both descriptive and abstract. A creation of short, omnidirectional brushstrokes–heavily impasted whites and grays that thin out at the upper edges into a mist that unites with the air–this apparition of nature’s transforming power is so forceful that it even bursts the barrier of the canvas, continuing out of sight on the left side. It’s the most furiously kinetic moment in a work that rolls and slides with energy. Looking, I think of Homer’s older contemporary (and Thomas Eakins’s friend) Walt Whitman, specifically his homoerotic vision in "The Sleepers" of a "beautiful gigantic swimmer" dashed upon the rocks:

Steady and long he struggles,

He is baffled, bang’d, bruis’d, he holds out while his strength holds out,

The slapping eddies are spotted with his blood, they bear him away, they roll him, swing

him, turn him,

His beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies, it is continually bruis’d on the rocks...¹

Glancing down at the painting’s foreground, at those long, foamy whites that are the immediate result of this collision, I think of another passage from Whitman, a less tragic one: the final vision of the speaker’s Dionysian dissolution in Song of Myself: "I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, / I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags."² I pause over those last two words. Lacy jags. Can there be a better description of the white streaks in the lower third of Homer’s painting? Poet and painter share a vision of nature as a theater of endless transformation, but Homer’s nature is darker than Whitman’s, just as Homer’s Darwinian Naturalism is darker than Whitman’s Romantic Humanism. Robert Hughes writes: "[F]or Homer...man is at war with his surroundings in a world that does not care and gives him no natural allies. The moment you step from the social path, whose security is an illusion, all becomes wild and strange, and the sea in Homer’s paintings was a metaphor of this perception."³ Hughes is writing of The Gulf Stream, but I find his words even more applicable to Maine Coast, for this is truly Homer’s Heart of Darkness vision. Here he exiles human civilization from his sight and looks only upon nature: its beauty, its violence, its awesome power to create and destroy.

Sublime, sublimate, sublimation. All three forms and meanings of the word–aesthetic, chemical, psychoanalytic–are relevant to a discussion of this painting. The aesthetic Sublime, as delineated at great and tiresome length by Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), is that quality of dark, powerful greatness in nature, art or society capable of provoking feelings of astonishment and terror in the observer. For Burke it is found in Alpine peaks, the "gloomy pomp"⁴ of Milton’s Paradise Lost and the almost unapproachable grandeur of a king on his throne. Since Burke’s ideas flowed into English Romanticism, the source of most British and American opinions about nature even to the present day, it is not surprising that we feel something of this same astonishment before Homer’s dark, rough, irregular image of the sea’s violence and vastness. Indeed, if one thinks of Burke while looking at Maine Coast, one can check off many of the characteristics of the Burkean Sublime: Obscurity, Power, Vastness, Infinity, Difficulty, Magnificence, Suddenness... But such textbook readings are an easy way to make great art very boring. The importance of Burke in this context is that he puts a name to some of the emotions that well up in us when we are face to face with Homer’s painting. This is sublime: the power that rolls out of the infinite sea and explodes in our minds.

In chemistry, to ‘sublime’ is to pass from a solid to a gas without an intervening liquid state. It’s an almost magical transformation, like an ice cube vanishing into water vapor without first melting to water, and I think of it, of course, in relation to Homer’s great burst of spray. Not technically sublimation, it is nonetheless an image of sudden, dramatic metamorphosis. Rolling seawater, the most powerful force on earth–powerful enough to wear away these rocks over centuries and destroy whole towns in a matter of minutes–collides against rock and explodes into one of earth’s lightest things: misty particles of water blown by the wind. The foam drifts out, the sea slams in, the process continues.

But what of the most salient meaning of ‘sublimate’ in our modern era, the Freudian channeling of socially unacceptable desires into more acceptable forms? Lloyd Goodrich writes that for Homer "sexual emotion, one of the motivating forces of art, had become sublimated, and all his great vitality was now channeled into the celebration of nature."⁵ The word ‘celebration’ is much too light to describe what Homer does with nature, but Goodrich makes an interesting point. As far as I can tell, Winslow Homer’s romantic and sexual life remains a blank to scholars. He never married, and we know of no love affairs or romantic liaisons. Robert Hughes calls him "celibate."⁶ If he went to prostitutes, we have no way of knowing. Bourgeois gentlemen of his day didn’t speak publicly of such matters. So the image we have of Homer is almost that of an adult Huck Finn, a rugged but sexless individual lighting out for the territory–in Homer’s case, the rocky coast of Maine–to escape from the civilization of New York City and the threat (as his more sexist age often saw it) of domesticity and effeminacy as represented by American women.

It’s easy to slap a Freudian interpretation on Maine Coast. The ocean represents Homer’s id, roiling with all the secret desires he has repressed. The rocks are the powerful punishing superego formed by the internalization of Victorian social mores. And the wave? That is a return of the repressed, the hidden sexual desires breaking the surface, coming up against the superego’s resistance and smashing into consciousness in a distorted, destructive, violent way. We’ve all heard the story before. Thomas Mann called it Death in Venice.

But we shouldn’t grasp at reductive psychoanalytic interpretations when something much more interesting and mysterious might be happening between Homer and the sea. The most memorable women in Homer’s work are the fishermen’s wives he first painted during his 1881-82 stay in the fishing village of Cullercoats on England’s North Sea coast. They are all of a type: solid, stocky, powerful, no-nonsense working class women. Pictured standing on rugged shorelines and staring out to sea, they are Homer’s Earth Mother figures, women who live in harmony with nature and have not a bit of the Daisy Miller daintiness of the girls Homer drew for Harper’s. Years after his English sojourn–and one year after Maine Coast–a sister of these Cullercoats women appears on the shore at Prout’s Neck in A Light on the Sea. It is a commonplace of Homer criticism that this dancing woman’s pose rhymes with the forms created by spumes of sea spray in other coastal paintings. But I think she is more than an ambiguously allegorical figure. Uniting the stocky Earth Mother body types of the English fishwives and the characteristic seaspray form of the Prout’s Neck paintings, she is a powerful pagan apparition. In this late painting Homer conjures a vision of the Mother Goddess of the sea, and he shows her dancing with a slow, oceanic rhythm on the edge of his land.

Is the sea a woman for Homer? Is it Whitman’s "fierce old mother incessantly moaning"⁶? Or is it the artist’s own mother (who was also a painter)? Winslow Homer, with his middle-class ways, his dandified dress, his handlebar moustache and his very American boast, "I will paint for money at any time. Any subject, any size,"⁷ seems like an odd choice for a celibate priest of the Mother Goddess. Yet, in a sense, that is exactly what he was. Painting in relative isolation, he devotes himself to the sea, watching it, sketching it, trying to capture in his poorer palette its endlessly metamorphosing colors and moods. He tries again and again, canvas after canvas, always different, always similar. But the protean sea resists capture, just as the paintings resist definitive interpretation. In this context, the curling wave and exploding spray of Maine Coast can be seen as the engine, the motivating force, of his late style. This explosive image of the sea is a vision of the dynamo that powers his painting and haunts his life. It is the constantly changing reality he must fix for all time; it is the unknowable sea he must know.

In each of his late seascapes, Homer asks the same question: How can a human being authentically paint the sea? It seems a foredoomed activity, because the sea contains all and is beyond the human, wholly Other. Homer’s ocean is not, as one scholar has suggested, "a blank screen on which his audience can project its own meanings."⁸ Rather, it is a superhuman plenitude of meaning, a union of opposites: calm and ferocity, creation and destruction, life and death. As the ultimate source of human life, it is the mother of all meaning, and like the Freudian mother it is ringed round with the deadly rocks of taboo. Homer cannot cross the rocky barrier, cannot mix with the sea. And it is, paradoxically, in this appreciation of the ocean as Other that Homer comes closest to capturing it. In canvases such as Maine Coast, where he eliminates human distractions and focuses completely on the inhuman ocean, we can sense the incredible power of the sea, the wave, the solid rock. We can feel the force of exploding spray in a passage of pure painting where the fury of the sea becomes the fury of Homer’s art.

So finally the painting brings us back to painting. Back to these brushstrokes on this canvas hanging on this wall in this quiet gallery. I called Maine Coast ‘uninhabited,’ but it only seems so. All of these late Homers in which the ocean rages and foams in solitude are actually inhabited by an undeniable human presence: the seeing eye, perceiving mind and painting hand of Winslow Homer. The painter is our surrogate, seeing for us, feeling for us, and in these late paintings he breaks through a mysterious barrier and lets us feel the sea through his paint. We feel alone with the ocean, with this infinity in a frame. And we feel a kinship with Homer, alone before the sea, alone before this canvas. These are the poor tools the painter has to work with: these paints, these brushes, this knife. And always out there, just beyond the door, the unknown, the unknowable, the incomprehensible sea.

NOTES

1. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 332-333.

2. Ibid., 96.

3. Hughes, American Visions, 313.

4. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, 103.

5. Goodrich, Winslow Homer, 39-40.

6. Whitman, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," op. cit., 213.

7. Robertson, Reckoning, 14.

8. Ibid., 7.

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