News Release the Metropolitan Museum of Art
news release The Metropolitan Museum of Art
For Release: Immediate Contact: Harold Holzer Jill Schoenbach
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENTS OF WINSLOW HOMER ON VIEW AT METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Major Retrospective Exhibition Will Include Works in All Media
Exhibition dates: June 20 - September 22,1996 Exhibition location: European Paintings Galleries, second floor Press preview: Monday, June 17,10 a.m. - noon
The creative power and versatility of one of America's greatest painters will be on view in the major retrospective exhibition Winslow Homer, opening June 20 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The most comprehensive presentation of Homer's art in more than 20 years, the exhibition will include approximately 180 paintings, drawings, and watercolors, and will offer a broad vision of his achievements over five decades. The exhibition, which was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, comes to New York after showings at the National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where it has been a great critical and popular success. The exhibition is made possible by GTE Corporation. Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan Museum, commented: "Homer's wide-ranging pictorial style and technical virtuosity have earned him a place among the nation's indisputable masters. This summer, we are proud to display the full range of Homer's genius to visitors to the Museum from across America and around the world." "GTE is honored to join The Metropolitan Museum of Art in presenting Winslow Homer. GTE's involvement in this exhibition is a corollary to our role in communications. Our support of the arts and education reflects our desire to enhance the quality of life in our society, challenge the human spirit, and enjoy the product of creative genius," said Charles R. Lee, chairman and chief executive officer, GTE Corporation. Born in Boston, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) spent his childhood in then-rural
Cambridge. He began his career about 1855 as an apprentice to a lithographer, for whom he
produced sheet-music covers and other commercial works. After two years, at age 21, he set out
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Communications Department 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198 212-570-3951 Fax 212-472-2764 WINSLOW HOMER PAGE 2 to be a freelance illustrator and soon was a major contributor of drawings for wood engravings to popular magazines. In 1859 he moved to New York, where the publishers who commissioned his illustrations were located. There he also pursued his ambitions as a painter, briefly attending life classes at the National Academy of Design. Except for a ten-month period in Paris and the
French countryside during 1866-67, and two years in England in the early 1980s, Homer remained in New York until 1883 and then settled permanently in Prout's Neck, Maine, where he lived until his death in 1910.
The Homer exhibition, which is organized chronologically and in thematic groupings, will address every aspect of his long career as an artist. It will include his depictions of the Civil War and Reconstruction; genre scenes celebrating the pleasures of peace; seaside images of
Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Cullercoats, England; oils and watercolors made during his vacations in the Adirondacks, Quebec, and the tropics; and powerful landscapes and seascapes of
Prout's Neck.
Six months after the outbreak of the Civil War, Homer was sent to the front in Virginia as an artist-correspondent for the illustrated journal, Harper's Weekly. The sketches he created — highly focused and personal vignettes of the sometimes dangerous, sometimes lonely lives of individual soldiers — were translated into wood engravings for the publication. His wartime experiences also inspired Homer's first significant oil paintings. Among the Civil War-era works on view in the exhibition will be The Sharpshooter on Picket Duty (1863), Pitching Quoits
(1865), The Veteran in a New Field (1865) and Prisoners from the Front (1866).
In the late 1860s and 1870s, Homer traveled during the summers to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to the Adirondacks and elsewhere in rural New York State, and to seaside resorts in New Jersey and Massachusetts, all of which were becoming increasingly popular venues
(more) WINSLOW HOMER PAGE 3 for tourism and recreation. The exhibition will feature many of Homer's portrayals of vacationers, including Bridle Path, White Mountains (1868), Long Branch, New Jersey (1869), and Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (1870). Homer also chronicled the lives of rural
Americans, as can be seen in such paintings as The Morning Bell 1871) and Milking Time (1875).
In all of these works, and in others such as Blackboard (1877) and The New Novel (1877),
Homer revealed his interest in portraying the modern American woman. Other frequent subjects for the artist were children ~ at play, in such paintings on view as Snap the Whip (1872), and on the farm, as in Weaning the Calf (1ST5). These works reflect Homer's keen awareness of social change and his devotion to recording American manners and mores.
In the summer of 1873, Homer visited the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he began to paint in watercolor. The show will include a number of his scenes of girls and boys enjoying childhood activities, including A Basket of Clams (1873) and In Charge of Baby
(1873). Homer later reworked one of his Gloucester watercolors for Breezing Up (1876), an oil painting that is the capstone of his Gloucester experiences.
About 1875, Homer returned to Virginia to observe the lives of former slaves during the first decade of Emancipation. He explored with sympathy the role of African-Americans in the newly reorganized, and yet still deeply unsettled, society of postbellum America in such paintings as The Cotton Pickers (1876) and The Carnival (1877), on view in a gallery devoted to the theme of Reconstruction.
During the summer of 1878, and possibly again in 1879, Homer visited Houghton Farm in
Mountainville, New York, near West Point. There he created dozens of engaging watercolors of farm girls and boys that attest to his increasing confidence as a watercolorist, as exemplified in the exhibition by Spring (1878) and Apple Picking (1878).
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When Homer spent the summer of 1880 in Gloucester, he lived in relative isolation in the lighthouse on Ten Pound Island, just offshore. From that vantage point, he painted a series of sailboats silhouetted against a sunset sky, including Eastern Point Light (1880) and Gloucester
Sunset (1880) ~ on view in the exhibition — that are among the most dramatic and expressive watercolors of his career.
"You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors," Homer is reported to have said.
His prediction was accurate: his watercolors provided him with a handsome income, they have never ceased to be admired, and their influence on artists of succeeding generations has been profound.
In 1881 and 1882, Homer worked in England, settling in Cullercoats, a fishing village near
Tynemouth on the North Sea. He soon became sensitive to the strenuous and courageous lives of the inhabitants, particularly the women, shown working as in Four Fisherwives (1881), or waiting at the water's edge for the return of their men, depicted most poignantly in Fisherman's Family
(1881).
In the summer of 1883, Homer left New York City to spend the rest of his life in Prout's
Neck, Maine, a peninsula ten miles south of Portland. There he embarked on a series of oils on the theme of people in conflict with the sea, which he had begun to explore in his English watercolors. In works on view such as The Fog Warning (1885), men challenge the ocean's power with their own strength and cunning; in The Life Line (1884) and Undertow (1886), they defy the ocean's overwhelming force in scenes of dramatic rescue.
An avid sport-fisherman and hunter, Homer produced several major oils and many splendid watercolors as a result of his visits to the Adirondacks (or North Woods) in upper New
York State. Among these in the show are The Adirondack Guide (1894) and Jumping Trout
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(1889), as well as other works, such as After the Hunt (1892) and Hudson River, Logging (1897), which depict with candor and deep feeling the brutal practice of "hounding" deer and the rapid destruction of the wilderness by commercial logging.
Watercolor became Homer's preferred medium on his many winter visits to Nassau in the
Bahamas, to Tampa and Key West in Florida, and to Bermuda. Among the examples on view are
A Garden in Nassau (1885) and Key West, Hauling Anchor (1903). Homer's experiences in the tropics also provoked his creation of a major oil ~ and one of the best-known of all his paintings
- The Gulf Stream (1899).
Among Homer's most admired works are his dynamic late seascapes, painted in Prout's
Neck from 1890 onward. These heroic paintings, which capture the beauty, force, and drama of the sea itself, include Northeaster (1895) and West Point, Prout's Neck (1900). Two exceptional oils on view from this period, Fox Hunt (1893) and Right and Left (1909), suggest Homer's preoccupation with mortality.
The exhibition will illuminate Homer's creative process with the installation of preliminary drawings, prints, and works in other media that relate to several of his major canvases. More of his prints may be seen in a companion exhibition, American Printmaking, 1860-1900: Winslow
Homer and His Contemporaries, drawn entirely from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will coincide with the Winslow Homer retrospective.
Winslow Homer was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The exhibition is accompanied by a.fully illustrated catalogue published by the National Gallery. It was written by Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., curator of American and British paintings and deputy senior curator of paintings, and Franklin Kelly, curator of American and British paintings, with contributions by Charles Brock, exhibitions assistant, and Judith Walsh, senior paper conservator,
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all at the National Gallery of Art. The catalogue will be available in softcover for $29.95 in the
bookshops of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The hardbound edition, distributed by Yale
University Press, will be available for $60 at the Metropolitan Museum and at bookstores
nationwide.
A complimentary brochure about Winslow Homer and his work will be available at the
entrance to the exhibition. The brochure, which is also available upon request in large type, will
list the many special programs and materials related to the exhibition at the Metropolitan. These
include public lectures, subscription lectures, gallery talks, documentary films, feature films, a
family guide, offsite programs, and programs for teachers and students. For information, call
(212) 570-3930; for information about services for disabled visitors, call (212) 879-5500, ext.
3561 (voice); TTY, call (212) 570-3828.
The exhibition catalogue and brochure are supported by a grant from The Henry Luce
Foundation, Inc.
At the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition is coordinated and installed by H. Barbara
Weinberg, Curator, American Paintings and Sculpture, with exhibition design by David Harvey,
Senior Exhibition Designer; graphic design by Barbara Weiss, Graphic Designer; and lighting by
Zack Zanolli, Lighting Designer.
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May 9, 1996