Winslow Homer

Waves battering the weathered rocks on a shore, young boys sailing carefree on open waters: Winslow Homer's raw, evocative seascapes are among the most distinctive and powerful in American art. "Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea" offers here a fresh exploration of Homer and his career-long preoccupation with the relationship between humans and the waters that define their world. This exhibition catalogue organizes Homer's sea-centered works by four periods that correspond to geographic locations: Gloucester, Massachusetts and other early East Coast seascapes; Cullercoats, England; Prout's Neck in Maine; and notations from his trips to tropical regions, such as the Bahamas and fishing retreats, such as the Adirondacks in New York. Distinguished European and American scholars, in a series of incisive essays, argue that Homer's seascapes need to be reevaluated. While acknowledging that most understand his paintings as premier examples of American realism, the contributors show that they are also distinctly modern in a way that set Homer radically apart from his contemporaries. Nowhere is this more evident than in his seascapes, where abstractions and expression battle his pictorial realism. The moving emotional undertones of his seascapes emerge in the compelling full-colour reproductions featured in the catalogue, as his paintings simultaneously capture the unique landscape of their geographic settings, the universality of man's relationship to the sea, and issues of pictorial representation in general. Published in conjunction with exhibitions in 2006 at London's Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Musee d'Art Americain in Giverny, "Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea" offers a new view of an American master.

Sophie Levy is the chief curator of the Musee d'Art Americain Giverny/Terra Foundation for American Art.