ART REVIEW : THE BREATHTAKING QUALITY OF HOMER’S WATERCOLORS

We always want art to be so profound that no distance seems too far to travel for it, no number of encounters renders it wearisome. We find such art among Picassos and Pollocks but we tend to associate it with Europe and Old Masters--the glow of Botticelli in the Uffizi, the resonance of the Sistine Ceiling, the refreshment of the Monets in the Orangerie.

Great names, big works, ripened cultures. The meeting is mellow, like a rendezvous with an old lover cherished in memory. There is an added jolt in finding vintage American work of this stature, especially in a medium not always associated with grand accomplishment. “Winslow Homer Watercolors” shows such art in a survey exhibition of more than 100 examples. It entranced the wanderer at the National Gallery last spring and is doing it again at the Amon Carter Museum, where it’s on view to July 27. If luck puts the traveler near the Yale University Art Gallery between Sept. 11 and Nov. 2, the third time will be a charm.

Homer’s watercolors are famous, but seen together they make you feel that no amount of praise for our 19th-Century art has ever been quite enough. Encountering them is physically breathtaking. Their limpid washes and transparencies gratify as free-standing aesthetic movement--like dances without theme or plot. They are satisfying in the abstract, the way John Marin’s watercolors were later.

But Homer, of course, describes the world. There are Huck Finn boys rowing in Gloucester Harbor, strapping fishermen’s wives in the English village of Cullercoats and black divers in clear waters off the Bahamas, which Homer called “the best place I have ever found.”

At his death in 1910, at 74, he’d painted watercolors for nearly 30 years. They look like something an artist might do for pleasure while basing his career on large oil paintings, as was true of the brilliant watercolors of John Singer Sargent. In fact, however, Homer’s watercolors seem to represent an artist having everything both ways.

He is often seen as a rather gloomy bachelor, grumbling about money and a bad stomach, seeking isolation in an undomesticated nature that matched his general psychic withdrawal. He was all that, but he was also an attractive, urbane chap whose introspective fishing trips were partly a function of his membership in the class of cultivated gentleman outdoorsmen that included President Cleveland and most of the privileged men of the time. When Homer painted a black girl in a lush Florida garden, he was staying in the best hotel in town and paid the bill with proceeds from the sale of the picture.

In short, these very private-looking images became popular and widely collected after an early period in which the critics resisted them as excessively odd (they meant original , but they didn’t know it). None of which means there was anything hypocritical or bogus about Homer’s life; on the contrary, it just means we need to be careful about stereotypes. It’s not the one-dimensional characters that are the most interesting.

Homer’s watercolors are a thoroughly unpredictable combination of spontaneity and precision. They also display an intense physical hedonism that is scarcely the hallmark of a dried-up old celibataire . They are so juicy they want to run down your chin like a big chomp out of an orange. This art glories in a sweaty midday sun bleaching the thatched roof of a Nassau beach cabin, celebrates the magnificent pile-driver power of a Prout’s Neck wave bashing into a tough old boulder.

If that, however, were the end of it, his watercolors would remain in the very fine company of Sargent’s. The difference is that Homer’s alchemical blend of crisp particulars and symphonic generalities charges his images with elemental meaning. His world borders that of Melville and Conrad. It is moral in the best sense. With no hint of preachiness, it conveys the belief that man and nature are linked as lovers and as adversaries. (Shows you what a difference the medium makes; Homer’s oils of subjects also done in watercolors sometimes feel lugubrious and moralistic just because they are bigger, darker and have dense surfaces.)

His treatment of women provides the most accessible example of his ability to meld observation and symbolism. A red-headed model he painted repeatedly in the late 1870s is assumed to have been of great personal significance to him--sometimes she is romanticized into the woman who broke his heart. Even if she was just a good model, she comes out as all his women do, vaguely self-obsessed and sulky but bulking larger than life. She is the classic Earth Mother, the source of both blissful comfort and gaping anxiety because she is in touch with primal forces that make her awesome to men. His combination of the tension between traditional male rationality and feminine intuition in “Blackboard” is so sophisticated it could have been painted today.

This is surely the most accurate portrayal of a certain masculine fantasy ever given visual form. And it rings true. Munch’s deadly vampires seem decadent caricatures in contrast.

Homer’s watercolors’ magic lies in his ability to capture something utterly particular--perhaps a storm rising, rattling the palms at Nassau--and open that scene onto a broader philosophical panorama. It sings the heroic futility of man’s cockroach cleverness locked enthralled in the titanic embrace of a Nature that creates and destroys with an indifference so glorious that it must finally be significant.