ISBN: HB: 9781588397478

Yale University Press, Metropolitan Museum of Art

April 2022

208 pp.

27,9x24,1 cm

150 colour illus.

HB:
£40.00
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Winslow Homer

Crosscurrents

This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career.

Long celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas. In particular, "The Gulf Stream" (1899), an iconic painting long considered the most consequential of his career, reveals the artist's lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. The book also includes Homer's depictions of rural life and the sea, in which he grapples with the violence of nature, as well as his Civil War and Reconstruction paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, which explore the unresolved effects of the war on the landscape, soldiers, and the formerly enslaved. Recognizing the artist's keen ability to distill complex issues in his work, "Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents" upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer's work resonates with the challenges of the present day.

About the author

Stephanie L. Herdrich is associate curator of American painting and sculpture, and Sylvia Yount is Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing, both at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.