12 WEEKLYPRESS.COM · UCREVIEW.COM · OCTOBER 17• 2012 Homer’s “Te Life Line” at PMA A well-known disaster in


Homer’s time – which he illustrated for Harper’s Weekly -- involved the Atlantic, en route to New York on April 1, 1873 when 562 of the 952 people aboard drowned, in- cluding all 295 of the women and all but one of the chil- dren. Then, a major storm in Gloucester MA took 174 lives and wrecked 31 ves- sels from the fishing fleet. In 1877, when the U.S.S. Hu- ron ran aground in a storm within 200 yards of the North Carolina coast, 98 lives were lost because the lifesaving brigade wasn’t scheduled for duty for another seven days. Public outcry grew louder and louder. An entire room is given to these tragedies and to


government’s altogether too slow response. Along with dramatic paintings, etchings, woodcuts, and editorial car- toons about watery disasters is documentation of the new interest in the bravery and heroism that accompanied a new technology. A video illustrates the new U.S. Life- Saving Service and changes in life-saving techniques. Eventually, there would be stations up and down the coast, trained and paid staff, an expanded watch season, and new technologies such as the breeches buoy used in The Life Line. (Philadelphians, note that in the summer of 1883, Homer became friendly with members of the lifesav- ing crew in Atlantic City, who showed him the breeches


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buoy and procedures for using it.) By 1886, the loss of life from shipwrecks had dropped by 75%. After Winslow Homer’s The Coming Away of the Gale (an earlier and a revised ver- sion are in the room with The Life Line) didn’t sell in 1883, Homer went bold in his next painting, moving in much closer to the figures and away from the ship, to focus on the interaction of new technology and human heroism. And he brought the separate worlds of men and women together into a shared combat with the sea. Previously, men could


not rescue themselves and a woman or child. Women and children were not strong enough to hold onto the icy lifelines and fell off and drowned. But the breeches buoy held them fast, even if they fainted.


Foster looks at the romance


of rescue and mysterious rescuer, and at the intimacy if not eroticism inherent in the physicality of rescue. She points out that Homer had several disappointments in love, and that the imagery of rescue of a vulnerable and suffering woman had par-


Winslow Homer - Study for “The Life Line,” c. 1883. Charcoal and white chalk on cream wove paper, lined. Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Charles Savage Homer, Jr.


ticular resonance for Homer in 1884 when his beloved mother, an artist, was dying. Foster also emphasizes


the role that conservators can play in understanding a work of art. Here, in a video of a recent X-radiograph and an infrared reflectogram of the canvas, the original under-drawing reveals a delicate revision on the paint- ing’s surface to accommodate the Victorian response to inherently erotic subtext of Homer’s “embracing” fig- ures.


In the only surviving study


for The Life Line, the young rescuer is clean-shaven and square-jawed under his oil- skin sou’wester, keeping his eyes properly on the shore


and not on the bosom under which his arm is stretched. In both study and original painting, the face of the young man was carefully detailed, but at the last mo- ment, Homer paints the red shawl of the fainting woman flying across his face, so that not only the waters but now the winds are formidable obstacles. On both formal and symbolic levels, it works. The woman is now beauti- ful – and beautifully built – young the visual and emo- tional center of the painting, while her rescuer is faceless, but even, by implication, more romantic, more heroic. Here, Foster twinkles a bit and says, “Who was that masked man?” to some who


remember the romance of the answer: “Why, son, that was the Lone Ranger.” Technology also shows the


rescuer’s hand first sensu- ously tangled in the woman’s hair while holding her right shoulder with one finger and thumb. Now, her head is thrown back, unsupported, while her hair and arm poignantly dangle over the abyss of the sea. And where the drawing has the hero’s thumb under her breast, now the fingers hook around a rope attached to a life buoy. Her rescuer is a Victorian gentleman, and the young woman’s virtue will not be threatened.


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Also, the woman’s right arm becomes thinner to increase her fragility, and instead of resting on the hero’s neck, his contact is now obscured by the scarf. Homer adjusts the dress so that there is a glimpse of her chemise and lower thighs, but if the clinging dress and flash of skin worked their way into the Victorian imagi- nation, here Homer managed to balance sensuality with propriety. Homer’s interest in human marine stories was intense between 1881and 1886; in the last two decades of his career and the last exhibi- tion room, he was balancing realism with the abstraction of elemental conflict. The energetic surface and texture of sea confronts land in bold diagonals, while the human figure so central to The Life Line becomes solitary and very, very small, if it exists at all. If a ship appears, it, too, is very, very small, an em- blem of the frailty of human existence. Spending winters painting alone on the Maine coastline, Homer, says Foster, was “almost drowned by the scale of the landscape and noise of the surf.”


For the exhibition, Foster has penned a 132-page catalogue ($20) with over 100 color photo- graphs, balancing her investiga- tion of Homer’s attachment to the sea with the long artistic tra- dition of marine paintings. The catalogue goes deep and wide, and like the exhibition, never loses its hold on the reader. From stem to stern, Ship- wreck! Winslow Homer and The Life Line is a spellbind- ing visual and historical, if not philosophical experience. See www.philamuseum.org for a special series of events, including lectures and a guided tour followed by experimenta- tion with watercolor.


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