An eye for the telling moment

Portland Museum of Art celebrates the centenary of Winslow Homer

August 07, 2010|Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

PORTLAND, Maine — Winslow Homer died 100 years ago. The Portland Museum of Art, which is 12 miles from Prouts Neck, where Homer spent the fertile second half of his career, is marking the centenary with a small but captivating display of Homer’s paintings, prints, and drawings, all drawn from the museum’s collection.

Given Homer’s preeminence in American art and his abiding popularity, which seems to unite both conservative and avant-garde tastes with its full-throated and enduring freshness, it is surprising that the centenary is not being marked by a more ambitious loan exhibition. But this country’s major museums, caught up as they are in renovations and recession-related retrenchments, have an air of distraction about them right now. And so it seems that any more expansive examination of Homer’s place in our hearts 100 years after his death will have to wait. (The state of Maine, however, is doing its best to compensate, with a series of displays of Homer works at such museums as the Farnsworth Art Museum, Saco Museum, and Colby College Museum of Art, pulled, in most cases, from their permanent collections.)

The Portland Museum of Art, which has impressive holdings of Homer and intimate links with the artist (he exhibited with the institution, known then as the Portland Society of Art, in 1893), could hardly neglect the occasion. But it is immersed in its own renovations — in this case, gratifyingly, of Homer’s Prouts Neck studio, which the museum acquired in 2006, and which it plans to open to the public in September 2012.

The Portland show, “Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place,’’ consists of four oils, 12 watercolors, and a handful of prints and drawings. One of the paintings is “Sharpshooter,’’ reckoned to be Homer’s earliest effort in oils, and still one of his most celebrated. This haunting Civil War image of a Union army marksman perched in a tree preparing to deliver death to an unwitting victim is a small, clear-eyed work entirely devoid of military bombast. In fact, it has the look of a photograph taken by a camera with a zoom: indeterminate viewpoint, subject caught unawares, decisive moment.

Homer was a witness to the Civil War. He provided illustrations to Harper’s Weekly magazine from Virginia during the fall campaign of 1861, and he returned there during the siege of Yorktown the following spring. “He suffered much,’’ wrote his mother that summer, “was without food 3 days at a time & all in camp either died or were carried away with typhoid fever. . . . He came home so changed that his best friends did not know him.’’