Peter H. Wood Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream.(Book Review)

Peter H. Wood Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream. The University of Georgia Press, 128 pages, $24.95

In my book The Rape of the Masters, I devote one chapter to the critical sabotage practiced upon Winslow Homer's famous maritime painting The Gulf Stream (1900), Homer's painting depicts a dismasted sloop bobbing helplessly in storm-tossed waters. Reclining on the rear deck is a shirtless, grim-faced Negro who scans the waters aft as a school of angry-looking sharks circles the boat. Asked by some anxious ladies for an explanation of the painting, Homer wrote to his dealer:

 
   I regret very much that I have painted a picture 
   that requires any description--The subject 
   of this picture is comprised in its title. ... 
   The boat & sharks are outside matters of little 
   consequence. They have been blown out to sea by 
   a hurricane. You can tell these ladies that the 
   unfortunate negro who is now so dazed & 
   parboiled, will be rescued & returned to his 
   friends and home, & ever after live happily. 

Well, the contemporary equivalent of those twittering ladies are the academic art historians who, unsatisfied with the art Homer has given them, insist on populating the painting with various political themes.

The chief villain of my reflections on Homer in The Rape of the Masters is Albert Boime, a professor of art history at the University of California at Los Angeles. According to Professor Boime, Homer's painting is "an allegory of the black man's victimization at the end of the nineteenth century." It has more to do with "the history of slavery in the West Indies" and "America's imperialist ambitions" than with Homer's effort to capture a scene from the Caribbean. I thought Professor Boime's interpretation was pretty extreme--indeed, I thought it was ridiculous. I still do.

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