Winslow Homer 'Coming Away' at Milwaukee Art Museum

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Winslow Homer, The Fisher Girl, 1894. Oil on canvas. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Gift of George D. Pratt (Class of 1893), AC P.1933.7. Bridgeman Images

Why did Winslow Homer—arguably the greatest 19th-century artist of the American experience—need to brave the Atlantic Ocean’s tempestuous waves and sail to England in 1881? He’d become increasingly famous for his true-to-life paintings of the Civil War and early Reconstruction. And weren’t the British who we fought for our beloved, hard-earned independence?

Nobody knows for sure why he went.

His artwork comprises almost all the documents we have of a private, reclusive man’s life. Some critics see him as a kind of Melvillian Ishmael, instinctively needing “to see the watery part of the world.” After time in London, he gravitated to the humblest and hardiest part of England, a remote coastal fishing village, Cullercoats, near Newcastle.

Perhaps, after American dramas subsided, Homer needed new challenges and subjects and more self-edification of the larger world. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s exhibition, “Coming Away: Winslow Homer & England,” aims to show that he also found his long perspective, his biggest-picture vision, in Cullercoats among the rolled-up sleeves, flopping fish and dripping nets.

Among the revelations were the fisherwomen, who formed the backbone of a tough life, turning the men’s labors into sustenance and commerce. Homer came to profoundly understand the violent beauty of the sea, and the stoic humans braced against crashing waves and other elements. His trip brought better understanding of his homeland whose people were imbued, unlike the Brits, with “the American dream” and New World bounty. Homer began to strip away the “new Eden” myth of America of which he, like most other artists, earlier partook.

The trip was “transformative,” says Brandon Ruud, MAM curator of American Art, who conceived the exhibit with curator Elizabeth Athens of the Worchester Art Museum, from which this extraordinarily promising exhibition will travel. Ruud quotes a contemporary Boston critic, who praised Homer’s art for “giving the truth, coolly confident that the poetry would be found in that.” Realism bled into atmospherics. Ultimately the sea was Homer’s greatest subject, Ruud says. After returning home, he moved to another remote location, Prout’s Neck, a tiny Maine peninsula with which the sea often has its wild ways.

The show is book-ended by two great paintings from the 1881-’82 Cullercoats period—MAM’s mythical, almost mystical Hark! The Lark (Homer’s personal favorite of his own paintings) and the brine-in-the-face drama The Gale from Worchester’s collection. Both depict women.

Of course, the classic damsel-in-distress trope arises in some images with this largely self-trained genius’ astonishing flair for drama. The exhibit includes the famous, breathtaking The Lifeline, in which a sailor rescues a near-drowned woman from a sinking ship. The two dangle over the snarling sea, transported along a British-invented pulley contraption called the breeches buoy. This scene also radiates symbolism and strong erotic overtones. Their limbs entwine and a soaked dress hugs the contours of a woman bereft, or in rapture?

And yet, far more often, Homer’s British and later work depicts strong women who are as courageous, in their ways, as men. In The Gale, a mother, with a terrified toddler peering from a papoose, braves the angry shore, hoping for some sign of her husband’s ship.

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Winslow Homer, The Gale, 1883–93. Oil on canvas. Museum Purchase, 1916.48. Image courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum.

Ruud says Homer also spent time in London museums and libraries before venturing to Cullercoats. Inspired by the epic British painter J.M.W. Turner, Homer became a virtuoso of watercolor, pushing that medium into uncharted waters. Photographs of Greek Parthenon sculpture, scholars surmise, helped him further model heroic and mythical figures. In Hark! The Lark, three women, loaded with goods, stand on a hill, ostensibly listening to the bird’s cry. Yet this scene suggests far more through closely observed facial portraits—their eyes, dark and hollow, stare aloft, but their stout bodies brace for something. They convey wary optimism as they gaze high across a distant horizon. Or is it some precipitous foreshadowing in the clouds, equally plausible in such transfixed faces?

Ruud concurs that these, and other Homer works of the period, amount to no less than a proto-feminism rising from this male American artist, right as the women’s suffrage movement gained power.

Yet finally, in some of Homer’s early 1890s images from the Maine peninsula, the humans recede into solitary figures amid craggy rocks and swirling tempests. One senses vast loneliness. Like Melville, Homer strove to evoke the encompassing indifference of Nature to human existence.

“Because this trip was so transformational, his work became more meditative and abstract,” Rudd says. “At the same time, he still does some detailed work, as of old.” Homer’s later work presages the gritty realism of the Ashcan School, and even abstract expressionism, “so with the modern era dawning, Homer is wrestling with his legacy.”

March 1-May 20 at Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Drive. For more information visit mam.org.