Industrial Modernism and the Hegelian Dialectic in Winslow Homer

This paper looks at the themes of nature, humanity, and military and industrial development in the nineteenth century American painter Winslow Homer through the lens of the Hegelian theory of art. Robert Pippin's After the Beautiful (2015) has recently put the Hegelian framework to very fruitful use in understanding pictorial modernism. This study of Homer follows a similar approach but argues that Homer's canvases represent a development in the modern spirt which, in many ways, goes beyond the canvases of Manet – a very tight modernist contemporary of Homer's. Homer communicates a presentment of the immense and, in certain profound respects, horrifying power of humanity's growing industrialization. I trace the development of this idea over the course of his career, from this early Civil War canvases to his final seascapes and argue that an understanding of Homer's work is important for understanding the modern spirit of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Oil Paintings

After the abolition of serfdom and slavery, Russian and American artists created oil paintings of peasants and African Americans that revealed to viewers the complexity of their post-emancipation experiences. Russian painters from the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions and American artists including Henry Ossawa Tanner, William Edouard Scott, and Winslow Homer created thematically similar works that depicted bondage, emancipation, military service, public schooling, and the urban environment. Their compositions shaped nineteenth-century viewers’ conceptions of freedpeople and peasants and molded Russians’ and Americans’ sense of national identity as the two countries reconstructed their societies during an era of substantial political and social reform.

Epilogue

By the end of the antebellum period, Bostonians’ habit of idealizing the urban landscape was yielding to the new transatlantic fashion of realism. Rather than idealize the city, realist writers and artists such as Winslow Homer documented it in detached and comprehensive detail. The declining commitment to a collective and idealized way of seeing can be read in a variety of domains, including art criticism, psychology, and even ophthalmology. The epilogue explains the rise of realism in Boston in terms of the development of middle class cultural institutions, suburbanization and geographic stratification. Less concerned with how Bostonians saw, a new generation of reformers and censors (such as the Watch and Ward Society) became exclusively preoccupied with what Bostonians saw.