Shipwrecks and Homer at the Art Museum (2nd review)

One painting can epitomize the romantic era and simultaneously connect with our own time. A single artistic creation may be able to meld adventure, tragedy and romance, and present all that within a two-foot by four-foot frame.

Look at Winslow Homer's The Life Line, the centerpiece of the Art Museum's current "Shipwreck" exhibition.

Tragedy at sea was a subject of emotional involvement from the time of the ancient Greeks— that is, since the original Homer— up through the sinking of the Titanic, to the Duck Boat that sank in the Delaware River in 2010. Our fascination with shipwrecks seems endless, but it was strongest during Winslow Homer's time (1836-1910), when all intercontinental journeys involved crossing deep, dark and potentially fatal oceans.

Some observers saw the romantic side of shipwrecks, where strong men rescued damsels in distress. The Life Line exploited that thrill of unexpected intimacy between strangers thrown together by disaster.

"Shipwreck" contains 30 works by Homer, complemented by precedents in the rescue genre and by Homer's preparatory sketches for The Life Line. It's curated by Kathleen Foster, who possesses a knack for finding drama behind each canvas. (She also organized the museum's 2010 examination of Eakins's The Gross Clinic.)

Masked man

The Life Line— painted in 1884, when Homer was 48— depicted a woman whose ship was overtaken by a storm. Holding the semi-conscious damsel is a courageous hero. Waves crash, winds blow, rocks threaten as a storm looms above them.

Originally Homer painted her rescuer's face but, just before the famous oil painting was displayed, Homer obscured his face with a billowing scarf. When Homer covered the man's face, he emphasized the loneliness of the woman's experience, and her rescuer became an impersonal force like the ocean itself.

The scarf is a mask, foretelling the later popularity of masked men, like the Lone Ranger, who also came to the rescue of the helpless. (George Washington Trendle, who created the Lone Ranger character, was born the same year that Homer painted The Life Line.)

The woman seems to have barely enough strength to loosely wrap one hand around a rope and cross her ankles. In 1884 some critics complained of the sexuality of a wet clinging dress and her exposed legs, but few modern eyes will see the eroticism in the picture.

Too much intimacy?

The showing of The Life Line is, in part, a restoration story. Modern technology revealed that Homer covered over the man's face and also that he scraped off the man's hand near the woman's shoulder. Too much intimacy for the New England artist, perhaps? Or was it just an effort to focus on the woman?

The exhibit also includes Homer's famous The Wreck of the Iron Crown (1881) and art works that influenced him, most notably The Shipwreck, by Claude-Joseph Vernet (1772). Vernet introduced the crucial elements of the shipwreck genre: a rock-bound coast, huge waves, lightning flashes and pathetic victims.

Homer's biggest innovation was his cropping of the action, focusing on central figures seemingly hanging in space. He also makes the drama seem so lifelike that the viewer wonders what's going to happen in the next few minutes.

As the exhibit demonstrates, the tradition of helpless women saved by gallant men was popularized in an earlier time period. By 1884, when Homer painted The Life Line, the Equal Rights Party had gone so far as to nominate a woman, Belva Ann Lockwood, for president of the United States.

Coast Guard's origins

Homer's work also chronicled the birth of the U.S. Lifesaving Service, which evolved into the Coast Guard. The U.S. government paid "surfmen" to patrol the beaches for trouble. Then they used cannon to shoot lightweight lines attached to a piece of iron that people on distressed ships could grab, establishing a link between the ship and the shore.

Homer's painting portrayed such a lifeline in use. The savior, holding the woman, hangs on to the cord above him as if it were a zip-line. In that decade, deaths at sea dropped impressively.

An attractive catalogue provides an exciting narration of the era and the genre. It includes an especially harrowing 1832 mezzotint by Henry Dawe, showing an apparently drowning mother holding her baby over her head, trying to keep the child above the deadly water.

Better in the book

The reproduction of this tiny work of art demonstrates the value of catalogues: A very small treasure might be overlooked when you walk through a museum. But enlarged on a page, it regains its deserved stature.

In the publication, curator Foster points out the precedents in popular fiction and poetry, such as William Falconer's "The Shipwreck" and Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus":

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

We also see monumental urns depicting dramatic scenes of shipwrecks and rescues. The culture was inundated with the subject. Then along came Homer to supply its most vivid expression.


To read another review by Andrew Mangravite, click here.