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Yet Homer did not simply view the sea as a danger. His sea pieces, even when the weather is bad, are seductive. The paint is of great richness, beautifully manipulated, running the gamut from thin, subtle glazes to expansive slathers of opaque pigment. And there is often a character of apparition: things are stranger than you imagine, though you believe he saw what he saw--witness the heads of the Gloucester fishermen appearing from the wave that hides their dory in Kissing the Moon, 1904, or the breaking wave on the rocks in West Point, Prout's Neck, 1900, that flings up an S curve of foam that might be a sinuous white torso: the ghost of a female presence, a water witch.
Such works remind you that the view of Homer that was current 20 years ago, and that this show corrects--that he was a realist in a simple and straightforward way--was wrong. It reckons without the deep strand of existential pessimism that runs in Homer's work and that creates its own symbolic structures. For Homer, as for another great and underrated artist, his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, man is at constant war with his surroundings in a world that cares nothing about him and gives him no natural allies. The moment you step from the social path, where security is an illusion, all becomes wild and strange, and Homer's work abounds in metaphors of this. One of the most piercing is Fox Hunt, 1893, which portrays the animal as existential hero. A starving red fox, set with Japanese simplicity and directness against a field of white snow, is harried by sinister crows that, though they cannot kill him, are harassing him toward his death.
Six years later, he painted The Gulf Stream, moving this apprehension from animal to man. A black sailor lies on the afterdeck of a dismasted sloop, adrift and rudderless in the deep Caribbean blue. Enormous sharks circle the boat. Their ominousness is reinforced by the zone of black water from which they rise. (The catalog, rather absurdly, suggests that celibate Homer was invoking that hoary phantom of the Freudian couch, the vagina dentata. This could make sense only to an art historian who has never been near a live shark.) On the horizon, a square-rigger sails indifferently by, and we see the waterspout of a coming tornado. There will be no rescue. The painting refers back to other images of marine disaster, notably Turner's Slave Ship and Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, in an image of total pessimism. This, Homer says, is what the voyage of life comes down to: hanging on and facing down your death when all hope is gone and there are no witnesses. It is a grim and hard-won vision, but in it, as in his descriptive powers, Homer remained supremely a realist.