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‘Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and “The Life Line” ’ at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

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The Philadelphia Museum of Art has devoted an entire exhibition to the Homer work, analyzing a small sub-genusof sea painting that turns out to have deep roots not just in the history of maritime art, but in philosophical, historical and political debates as well. “Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and ‘The Life Line’ ” brings together diverse strands of intellectual history, from the now largely forgotten tradition of lifesaving and rescue along the Atlantic seacoast to the persistent question of American exceptionalism: Are we the sort of people who put women and children first, who will go to exceptional lengths to preserve life, or are we a dog-eat-dog nation, where every-man-for-himself is the ruling ethos?

Homer’s picturewas a popular and critical success during the artist’s lifetime, but it has been overshadowed since by his later sea paintings, in which the abstract drama of water takes precedence over the narrative drama in “The Life Line.” Homer was never really comfortable painting faces, and his figure painting is often clumsy. But in “The Life Line” he finessed his weaknesses, obscuring the male face entirely and painting the woman lost in an expressionless swoon. What emerges is the pure drama of their predicament, and the implied sexual tension in their close embrace.



Two popular images by the atrocious 19th-century artist Henry Edward Dawe show the range and reach of this conceit. The 1832 “My Child! My Child!” shows a woman overboard, holding her baby aloft in hope of rescue. “They’re Saved! They’re Saved!” completes the drama, with a sailor plucking them from the water and hoisting them to safety. But the content of the images is mildly pornographic: The bare breasts of the woman and the rippling muscled back of the sailor. Displayed nearby are two porcelain vases that use the same Dawe images as decoration and there are subtle but telling differences between the prints and their reproduction on a standard bit of houseware: There are no bare breasts on the vases, which would presumably have been on open display and thus subject to a more public, moralizing gaze.


The exhibition loses focus with a sidetrack into the parallel tradition of painting peasants and fishing communities, which is only tangentially related to the Homer work. But a room devoted to the professionalization of lifesaving and coast guard work is surprisingly timely. After several deadly shipwrecks in the 1870s, including the wreck of the Atlantic in 1873 (with more than 500 lost), popular outrage led to government action, and the establishment of a professional network of coastal lifesaving. The results were impressive: The use of lifelines (fired from a cannon on shore), lifeboats and the presence of skilled lifesavers along the shoreline saved thousands of lives.

Lifesaving didn’t however come about without a political fight. A cartoon by Thomas Nast frames it in very contemporary terms: A grumpy Uncle Sam overlooks a beach littered with bodies and debris, grumbling that he must spend so much on lifesaving services (“. . . it is too bad to be obliged to waste so much money”). The deeper political implications of Homer’s painting, and many lesser works like it, are still felt today, as politicians debate the extent to which we are obliged to live in the Darwinian jungle.

Over the course of the 19th century, boats also became safer, and navigation more precise. But human fears have deep vestigial roots, and paradoxically as the danger diminished the fear grew more intense. And it lives on in films such as “Titanic,” and “The Perfect Storm,” and in the trailers for “Life of Pi.” But the appetite for the disaster image has shifted over the past century: It’s hard to imagine, for example, that images of bodies from the 9-11 attacks would be popular fare for artists today. Disaster imagery must today be either at a geopolitical remove (happening to other people safely remote from people like us) or so stylized as to be no more terrifying than an Aesop fable.


Seen in that context, the earlier “The Life Line” has yet more resonance. The sexuality of the work becomes allegorical, a statement about making life in the midst of a nasty, hostile, meaningless world. A shipwreck painting transcends its own traditions by eliminating the shipwreck and focusing entirely on two people, joined together, suspended momentarily above doom.

Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and ‘The Life Line’


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