REALIZING THE REAL

A frank, absolute, sincere expression of any tendency is always interesting. --Henry James on Winslow Homer, 1875

JUST how interesting Homer's earnest art was to remain, no Victorian could have guessed. In his day he seemed strong but crude. Now. in an age of infinitely cruder painting, it is the strength of Homer's honesty that tells. This week, 48 years after Homer's death. Washington's National Gallery is honoring his memory with a big retrospective show. The 241 pictures proved to the hilt that Homer's passion was for realizing life as he saw it. and as forthrightly as he possibly could. Said Museum Director John Walker: "One of our functions is to honor great American artists of the past, and we plan to keep on doing it with shows like this every two years; but Homer is really my hero.''

Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum will inherit the show Jan. 29. In the exhibition catalogue, the Metropolitan's Albert Ten Eyck Gardner advances a theory on the evolution of Homer's style that might have startled Henry James. Realist though Homer is. says Gardner, he probably got his great inspiration from the same source that sparked the School of Paris: Japanese prints. Homer lived in Paris in 1867, must have been aware of the fashion for things Japanese, which had already led Manet to simplify, sharpen and contract his pictured scenes. Homer inwardly resolved to do the same. Gardner believes, but like a Yankee, "he chose to keep his mouth shut."

Gardner finds Searchlight (see color) "particularly Japanese in its refined monochrome patterns." After the Hurricane also has one Japanese quality--its rendition of energy through design. The stunned stillness, the animal defeat in Homer's watercolor might seem diametrically opposed to Ogata Korin's lively imaginings (see above); yet the two men would have understood each other. Both spoke in terms of powerfully simple compositions.

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