The Metropolitan Museum of Art abuts Central Park rather than the East River, but a viewer fortunate enough to attend “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” can be forgiven for thinking that she is surely on the shore, with salt in the air and brine on her hair. Like few others, Homer is a painter of the sea, and in painting after painting it feels as if the waves are set to break through the frame. “Crosscurrents” is a generous selection of 88 oil paintings and watercolors, with 65 of them on loan from other museums and private collections. The director of the Met, Max Hollein, told the press that this show is the most significant overview of Homer’s oeuvre in the last 25 years. The show’s curators insist that its theme is one of “conflict,” but time spent with Homer suggests something like its reverse — an artist who saw America whole and well, and whose paintings capture a luminous and perpetual late afternoon, sunniness seasoned with sadness.Winslow Homer largely painted landscapes. They capture the intimate weather of a life lived through the thick of the 19th century. Born in 1836 in the “American Athens” of Boston, Homer was initially a commercial illustrator and newspaperman before attaining mastery in both oil painting and watercolors. Harper’s Weekly sent Homer to the front lines of the Civil War as an embedded journalist and artist with the Union Army, and some of this show’s most affecting pieces — like “Prisoners from the Front” and “The Veteran in a New Field” — capture the end of the war with dignity and pathos. We don’t get the heat of battle, but we see a human glow.Winslow Homer, ‘The Veteran in a New Field,’ 1865. The Metropolitan Museum of ArtHomer’s work from this period offers a wise, warm, and wary visual language with which to approach the matter of race during the years of war and Reconstruction. “A Visit from the Old Mistress” works with the precision of a photograph. It captures the extraordinary moment when former slaves met the woman who was once their master. Neither side is certain of the terms of the new world that has come into being through blood and iron. One black woman remains seated during the encounter, and the stiff formalism of that posture is deafening through oil. After the war, Homer famously made his home on a coastal peninsula in the south of Maine called Prout’s Neck. The coast became his subject and his muse, and “Ship’s Boat” is a terrifying study of being thrown overboard. “Northeaster” delivers a raging storm and a brewing sea flecked with whitecaps, threatening to swallow up the entire canvas. “A Basket of Clams,” on the other hand, is an almost desolate look at what the surf leaves behind, leavened only by the pride two boys take in collecting the crustaceans. Somehow, the watercolor conjures feelings of sand, its grains in disguise. A late work, “Kissing the Moon,” dispenses with land entirely and thrusts us out to sea.Winslow Homer, ‘The Gulf Stream,’ 1899. The Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe centerpiece of “Crosscurrents,” both spiritually and spatially, is “The Gulf Stream,” a work from 1899 that features a black man on a rudderless fishing boat, on the verge of capsizing into shark infested waters. Stalks of sugarcane are splayed across the deck. Homer later added a barely visible schooner to graft some hope onto the scene, but it remains a vivid rendering of the coordinates where heroism and despair meet. “The Gulf Stream” is inspirited by Homer’s two months in the Bahamas, which here is recorded with works that tincture the exhibit with the tropical. For those who think of him as a dour New Englander, these works will come as a surprise. “Oranges on a Branch” is a riot of color against the Maine blues and whites. In “The Turtle Pound,” Homer unspools an intoxicating sea of blues and greens.Winslow Homer, ‘The Turtle Pound,’ 1898. Brooklyn MuseumFor viewers whose eyes begin to droop at the prospect of watercolor landscapes, “Crosscurrents” provides works whose dynamism thrills just as much as a circus or battle. “Right and Left,” painted soon before the artist’s death, is astonishing. It depicts two birds in mid-flight and at eye level, arced and angled in the air. Homer’s waves froth at the bottom of the painting, and the two birds writhe in its center. At first glance it looks triumphant, but on closer viewing its macabre circumstances snap into focus. One bird has been shot and the other will soon be. This is a dance of death, and in the background a gun’s smoke is detectable, the barrell aimed straight at the viewer. A flicker of orange flame pops above the water. Time spent with Homer’s art conveys the sense of a man acquainted with land and sea, war and peace, the storm and the shore. He created portals that transport to places of ripping gale force winds and secure harbors. For Americans, Homer’s paintings are lighthouses on the way home.
