The Ideas Bristle

Of thousands of movies made since Hollywood opened for business, only one significant film features a nominal art critic as main protagonist. “Laura,” the 1944 noir classic by Otto Preminger, concerns the death by shotgun-blast-to-the-face of a legendary beauty, whose stunning loveliness lives on in a haunting oil painting. Waldo Lydecker, the acerbic newspaper columnist smitten with the fatal femme, turns out to be a murderer.

The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl once pointed out that, in America’s popular consciousness, art critics are perceived to have a rather odious job, which Lydecker’s singular story of murderous obsession reveals. Art critics kill beauty. In this worldview, art is an innocent pursuit but criticism surely isn’t.

“Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s” is an unusual exhibition that examines the complex relationship between assorted early practitioners of art criticism and an important American artist. At the entrance to the show, which opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a quote by Homer’s contemporary, the novelist Henry James, is blown up to monumental proportions on the wall. James, whose writings regularly compared the sophisticated culture of Europeans with the naive qualities of Americans, performs a wicked slash-and-burn of the painter who, with Thomas Eakins, turned out to be one of the two preeminent American artists of the 19th century.

Welcome to the show. Art critics kill beauty.

That blunt cliche, offered anew on LACMA’s entry wall, is fortunately not the story that the far more nuanced exhibition inside proceeds to tell. Organized by the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., where it was seen earlier this year, “Winslow Homer and the Critics” looks instead at a particularly tumultuous period in the social and cultural life of the nation. If at times it gets a bit bogged down in the details, it nonetheless illuminates crucial aspects of a pivotal moment--for both Homer and America. And there’s some wonderful painting.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) is today universally embraced as a powerful visual poet whose fluid brushwork and bold compositions created big metaphors for the contested relationship between Man and Nature. As the earlier Hudson River painters were to Emerson and Thoreau, Homer’s late paintings of the sea along the dramatic coast of Maine were to Melville and the whale.

Less widely acknowledged is the fact that Homer also launched an extraordinary tradition: Watercolor stood as perhaps the greatest continuous achievement in all of American art, until World War II, with a virtually unbroken string of major practitioners: Dove, O’Keeffe, Demuth, Burchfield, Marin, etc. Homer’s watercolors have long been held in high esteem--he benefited from the childhood example of his mother, Henrietta Benson Homer, who was an accomplished amateur in the medium--but their larger historical role is equally impressive.

The concise exhibition at LACMA includes 31 oils, 21 works on paper and one less-than-felicitous experiment in decorative tile design. It is bracketed by Homer’s two journeys to Europe--the first begun in late 1866, when he started a nearly year-long sojourn in France; and the second in 1881, which stretched to 20 months and was spent in England. Like many self-taught American artists, Homer had first worked as a successful illustrator for periodicals, especially Harper’s Weekly. (A Civil War correspondent for Harper’s, he had chronicled the Union soldiers’ daily lives and unheroic routines.) But he had bigger artistic plans.

Immediately after the war, Homer created a sensation with “Prisoners From the Front,” a carefully observed oil depicting a range of Confederate soldier-types being turned over to a sympathetic Union officer. The post-battle scene sought to cast complex American experience in a mold long established by French history painting. Homer’s subsequent excursion to Paris exposed the ambitious 30-year-old to more advanced currents swirling in European art, especially Barbizon landscapes and homely subjects of peasants working the fields. He brought those lessons home with him.

The exhibition, as its subtitle suggests, focuses on the noisy debate over what exactly would constitute a national art--an American art, distinct from European precedent--in the anxiety-ridden 1870s. This was a general issue being confronted in many places, following the collapse of monarchies and the rise of the nation-state. But the argument took on special urgency for a republic that had just survived the bloody, wrenching trauma of civil war.

It was framed, the show suggests, by several prominent developments. Three are familiar, including the failure (or scuttling) of Reconstruction as moral and material compensation for the cruel horrors of slavery; the worst economic collapse the young nation had yet known; and, the unstoppable transformation of social life wrought by Industrial Revolution.

A fourth development was the proliferation of journalism, both daily newspapers and specialty magazines, and with it the first full flowering of art criticism in the United States. If America in the 1870s didn’t exactly produce a home-grown Baudelaire, it did generate a vigorous, sometimes contentious climate of public conversation about painting and sculpture that simply hadn’t existed before. Much of that conversation concerned Winslow Homer, the most plainly gifted and decidedly exasperating artist of the day.

At LACMA, various Homer oils and watercolors are paired with snippets of contemporaneous reviews of his work. The handsome and thorough catalog for the show gives an almost year-by-year reckoning of critical commentary. Sometimes it’s too much--as if Homer painted, a critic wrote, Homer adjusted his painting, a critic rethought and so on. But the general give and take between artist and audience is fascinating and often enlightening.

The critics regularly differed among themselves (imagine!), but a certain constancy does emerge. In deciding what was putatively American about American art, in general, and about Homer’s art in particular, two issues loomed large. One concerned subject matter, the other technique.

A lovely picture like “The Cotton Pickers,” painted during the nation’s centennial year (and, happily, part of LACMA’s permanent collection), could be seen as American on its face. Two black women, represented with solemn dignity and not a trace of sentimentality, stand before the agrarian landscape like humble Nikes, their heads wreathed in farmers’ bonnets and with baskets of cotton as their palm branches. African Americans were frequently subjects of Homer’s oils and watercolors, and these include some of the most compelling works in the show.

Sometimes the presumed American-ness of the subject is more submerged. In the radiant, light-infused interior of a one-room schoolhouse, for instance, the unprecedented American pledge of universal education as a linchpin for functional democracy is implied. In the classic picture of farm boys at play, “Snap the Whip” (1872)--and indeed in the general abundance of Homer’s relaxed, candid, unsentimental images of children, both white and black--the promise of America’s future is unfurled.

Technique was an equally slippery issue. Homer, especially because of his gifts as a watercolorist, was regularly lambasted for paintings that looked sketchy and unfinished. Like their compatriots in the French Academy, many American observers perceived a sketch to be an incomplete and unrefined idea, unworthy of major cosmopolitan art.

By contrast, the steady critical call for a display of “manly vigor” in subject, style and composition might be answered in part by bravura brushwork. Yet, mostly that call betrayed deep-rooted fears that American culture was becoming feminized. As male farmers and fishermen began their steady exodus to the urban factory, leaving women the tasks of domestic labor, Homer increasingly portrayed the fading theme of Man and Nature, for which he would be remembered.

“Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)” (1876) is a knockout early example, the best painting in the show. The choppy sea, sky and clouds are wide horizontal expanses of mottled color. No middle ground is depicted--just a silhouetted boat off in the background and a dramatic sloop commanding the foreground. Homer typically composed on a grid, adding dynamism by tipping major elements 90 degrees. Here, he also tilts the sailboat in space, creating an ample volume of luminous air at the picture’s core.

A man guiding the sail’s ropes is accompanied by three boys who lean against the wind, their backs carved out of light. Pulling together, a generational tableau stabilizes the little vessel in choppy waters, enacting fundamental lessons in survival. At the moment of America’s centennial, when so much seemed at stake, the extraordinarily handled image carried special meaning. Even the discordant critics were impressed.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 857-6000, through Sept. 9. Closed Wednesdays.