There is a painting in this magnificent survey of the American realist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) that is as frightening as anything you will see in a gallery. It shows a fisherman surging up a turbulent wave in his fragile boat, while an obliterating fog starts to roll in on the horizon.
The boat tips, the catch slithers, the man rows hard against the oncoming menace, head backlit against the fading light. Will he make it back to the distant mother ship before it disappears? There is no way of knowing. The painting takes you right out there, all at sea with the lone figure in his peril. It does not bring you comfortably back.
That Homer saw such a scene himself is beyond doubt. He painted The Fog Warning in 1885 at Prouts Neck on the craggy Maine shoreline, where he lived alone in a beach cottage for more than a quarter of a century. The cottage itself hovers like a ghost in thickening fog in one scene viewed from black rocks on the sands. The North Atlantic is wild, wind-torn and mercurial in his art, a terrible field for the local fishermen to harvest, their boats almost sinking between gargantuan waves. But it is also, and always, stupendous.
Homer paints the sea spiralling upwards in volcanic eruptions, or rolling straight at you, throwing up spectres of foam or suddenly becalmed in an ominous silence. He gets its force as superbly as its freezing liquidity. There is a staggering work titled Northeaster in which incoming waves, showing their green translucence against an eerie grey sky, shatter against a jagged promontory in breakers so fierce the instinct in the gallery is to duck.
But Homer is right there on the rock, steadfast against the tide. His true subject from first to last is mankind’s struggle for survival. Born in Boston, which had no art school, he was mainly self-taught, learning the rudiments of his craft in a local lithography shop. Like so many future stars from Edward Hopper to Andy Warhol onwards, he started out as a commercial illustrator.
Sent by Harper’s Magazine to cover the civil war, Homer brought back paintings that could in turn be transformed into prints. The most famous are all in this show, from the Union sharpshooter up a tree, picking off his enemies with a rifle, to the Confederate soldier standing up in starved defiance on his hillock to be shot down, towards the end of the deadly siege of Petersburg in Virginia. Like the moments they describe, these are epochal images.
But the great icon of civil war art in fact shows the aftermath. Homer painted The Veteran in a New Field in 1865, after the surrender of General Robert E Lee. It shows the eponymous veteran with his back to us before a wall of wheat beneath a burning blue sky. His shirt is a thick white flash as he raises a heavy scythe to the harvest, the mown stems scattered all around in what inevitably looks to modern eyes like the origins of a Jackson Pollock.
On the ground, the veteran’s old Union jacket lies discarded. A single blood-red dab draws the eye to Homer’s signature, inscribed in the same pigment alongside. Swords into ploughshares: that it is the obvious biblical subtext; but the grim reaper is still at work.
Homer used blades, sticks and palette knives. There are areas of paint so wildly disconnected from what they describe as to appear very nearly abstract – a heavy white smudge to ignite a harbour wall, butter-yellow strokes that resolve into a ship’s moonlit sails – and the sheer force of his brush is like a rallying cry.
One of the greatest pictures here shows a woman bearing a basket along a rocky ledge in a gale that billows her apron as dangerously as the sails of the boat on the waves – the woman, like the work, literally a tower of strength. And this is the painter working, now, just as forcefully in fugitive watercolour.
Homer may have disappeared, like a second Emerson, into seclusion in Maine. But there were fishing trips to the Caribbean, which produced on-the-spot watercolours of storm-harried palms and sharks seething in the translucent waters off Nassau. Somehow their content is too familiar (and over-represented, at 18 out of 50 paintings). Homer’s power comes at least in part from his utter strangeness.
Two ducks fight for their lives above an expanse of murderous black sea – one struggling against the horizontal wind, the other head down into the water as if shot. Homer paints them in astonishing closeup, as if you were right there with them, hanging in the air between life and death.
The dark figures in The Life Brigade stand paralysed by the prospect of a roiling ocean that just keeps on coming: should they risk their lives? And in the fantastically dramatic painting that concludes this show, you realise that this was the crux all along. Kissing the Moon shows only the heads of three fishermen, their bodies entirely obscured behind a thunderous wave that rises up the painting, so that you realise their boat must be plunging down between two potentially fatal breakers. How will they survive? The picture holds the scene, and their lives, exactly in the balance.
Unless you have been to the museum in Kaunas that takes his name, you are unlikely to have come across the visions of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Lithuanian painter and composer, who died of pneumonia in 1911 at the age of 35. His works are as outlandish as they are delicate. Each is a world within a world, exquisitely painted in tempera, very often on cheap paper or cardboard.
Light flickers in a Lithuanian forest, and the trees turn into shifting figures. Two crowned heads gaze down at a cityscape contained in a glowing crystal orb. A tower of boxes, beautifully painted with angels and archers in scarlet and gold, rises like a pyramid above what turns out to be an imaginary landscape, once you notice the minuscule smoking towers far down below.
Cities on hills glimmer beneath multiple moons. Moonlight strikes a lake, not once but somehow twice. Spectral dinosaurs join the animals of the ark, lead onwards by figures carrying banners that irresistibly hint at the free Lithuania that Čiurlionis did not live to see. Streams of pale stars girdle these visual poems.
There are undertones of 19th-century symbolism and theosophy throughout, and inevitably people have claimed to see (or hear) music in his art, specifically the lyrical yearning of his piano works. But Čiurlionis at times tend towards an abstraction that precedes even Kandinsky, particularly in the ethereal Winter sequence. Here, the fall of snow upon the land is gradually reduced, painting by painting, until it becomes nothing but white light against brown paper. A mesmerising sight in another of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s revelatory shows.
Star ratings (out of five)
Winslow Homer: Force of Nature ★★★★★
MK Čiurlionis: Between Worlds ★★★★
Winslow Homer: Force of Nature is at the National Gallery, London, until 8 January 2023
MK Čiurlionis: Between Worlds is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 12 March 2023
