Topic: Looking at Winslow Homer: Theories, Methods, Meanings
Since the late nineteenth century, Winslow Homer has quite consistently occupied one of
the highest niches in the pantheon of American artists ranked great by scholars, curators,
connoisseurs, critics, and collectors.  Yet the meanings of his art have been mutable.  The same
images can bear quite different connotations at different times, depending on the observer's own
historical, political, sexual, and personal vantage points.  Such mutation of meaning is hardly
unique to Homer.  His life, career, and oeuvre are of particular interest, though, because of his
status as a great American painter, a great realist painter, a great modern painter, and a great
masculine painter   all four terms in themselves subject to endless contention.

The purpose of this seminar is to engage with some of the important themes, issues,
problems and pitfalls in Homer's art, while becoming familiar with available resources, collections,
and bibliographic tools.  We will sample historical criticism and recent scholarship, comparing,
contrasting, and evaluating the relative merits of (among others) biographical, social-historical,
psychoanalytical, and formalistic modes of inquiry into the painter's life and work.  Equally
important, we will spend time looking intensively and analytically through our own eyes at
individual works as paradigmatic Homer "problem pictures."

Joint offered with AMST G620