Post-God Landscape Paintings of Winslow Homer at Massachusetts' Museum
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Holland Cotter
MASSACHUSETTS---Winslow Homer was America’s first great post-God landscape painter. Before the Civil War, successful artists like Frederic Church and Asher B. Durand made pictures of New World vistas bathed in transcendental light. Theirs was an art of religious theater. In that art, Nature was a colossal, purposeful moral consciousness; the human presence, if visible at all, an awe-struck speck.. Much of the expressive range of Homer’s art is encompassed, in broad outline, in the 11 oil paintings that form the core of “Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History,” this summer at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute here in Williamstown.
By Holland Cotter
MASSACHUSETTS---Winslow Homer was America’s first great post-God landscape painter. Before the Civil War, successful artists like Frederic Church and Asher B. Durand made pictures of New World vistas bathed in transcendental light. Theirs was an art of religious theater. In that art, Nature was a colossal, purposeful moral consciousness; the human presence, if visible at all, an awe-struck speck.. Much of the expressive range of Homer’s art is encompassed, in broad outline, in the 11 oil paintings that form the core of “Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History,” this summer at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute here in Williamstown.