THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 57fore in two substantive paintings, “The
Bright Side” and “Army Boots,” which,
while they don’t trade in physical stereo-
types, show the men at rest, all but one
lying down—or, as Shaw and others see
it, purveying “tropes of Black indolence.”
It seems fair to say that the painter who
would end up “breaking artistic stereo-
types about the Negro,” in the words of
Alain Locke, a leader of the Harlem
Renaissance and a scholar of African
American art, was still finding his way.
His early depictions of Black men were
variable. Whether owing to some per-
sonal acquaintance, however, or to the
absence of fear, or to simple empathy,
he never wavered in the dignity he ac-
corded Black women.
It is doubtful whether Homer was
ever near the Confederate prison known
as Andersonville, in southwestern Geor-
gia. But, within months of the war’s end,
the artist, like everyone in the North
who could read a newspaper, knew about
the brutal conditions that ultimately re-
sulted in the death there of thirteen
thousand captured Union soldiers. The
camp’s commander was put on very pub-
lic trial, and was hanged. Homer made
no attempt to show the prison itself. Yet
his response was as large in intellectual
scope and feeling as it is visually re-
strained and indirect. “Near Anderson-
ville,” completed in 1899, shows a young
Black woman, modestly but neatly
dressed and wearing a white apron,
standing in the doorway of a rough-
hewn dwelling, looking to the side, deep
in thought. Only at the edge of the paint-
ing do we see the soldiers she has seen
already, captive Yankees being led off by
Rebel forces, the triumphant Confed-
erate flag flying overhead.
Without bloodshed, or brutality,
Homer conveys the stakes of Union
losses—the stakes of the war—in the
face of one enslaved woman. She is de-
picted with neither the pitifulness nor
the titillating nudity that made the
female slave an attractive subject to
many artists. (And to audiences. Hiram
Powers’s“The Greek Slave,” a prettily
chained white marble nude, was one
of the most popular works of the nine-
teenth century. Even Jean-Baptiste Car-
peaux’s sympathetic bust of a Black
woman, titled “Why Born Enslaved!,”
completed in 1873 and the centerpiece
of another current Met show, is bound
with ropes that frame one bared breast.)
This woman is all consciousness. We
are drawn in by the workings of her
mind, her difficult but masked emo-
tions—she couldn’t risk letting any re-
action show—as, the Mona Lisa of the
Civil War, she weighs her future and
the future of her country.“
Ithink that it would probably kill
me to have such a thing appear,”
Homer wrote to an inquiring biogra-
pher, in 1908, two years before he died,
at the age of seventy-four. “And as the
most interesting part of my life is of no
concern to the public I must decline to
give you any particulars in regard to it.”
Biographers are a fairly undiscourage-
able group, and the first biography of
the artist was duly published in 1911.
There was not a lot to work with, aside
from the work itself. Homer’s two broth-
ers volunteered some stories, but there
was, otherwise, scant personal material.
He was closely attached to his parents
and to his older brother. He never mar-
ried and had no known romantic rela-
tionships; the record offers little even
about close friendships. There are no
diaries, and hardly any letters of sub-stance. (Homer’s moral condemnation
of telescopic rifles is one of the few ex-
amples we have of serious thought put
into words.) No protégés, no public life.
Clement Greenberg, dismissing a later
Homer biography, in 1944, blamed the
fact that the book was “hard reading”
on Homer, since he had “practically no
life aside from his art” and “no inner life
worth mentioning.” This was, of course,
just what Homer would have wanted.
Yet intrepid biographers have pressed
on, drawn by the siren song of all he
did instead of living.
Cross’s scrupulous new book is de-
voted to Homer as both man and art-
ist and is largely a pleasure to read, de-
spite the inevitable difficulties of the
subject: call him repressed; call him, as
Cross does, “a misfit by nature” or even
a “human periscope,” who liked to ob-
serve others without being seen. Cross
tries to circumvent these difficulties by
placing the life in a wider context, par-
ticularly in Homer’s early years, when
abolitionism was ablaze in Boston and
in Cambridge, where the boy grew up,
exposed to mounting outcries about
the evils of slavery. Homer’s family was
middle class but struggled to remain“We’ll take out Greg in post.”••