When asked by his dealer to explain his most disquieting painting,The Gulf Streamof 1899, depicting a Black sailor adrift in shark-infestedseas, Winslow Homer responded, “The subject of this picture is comprised inits title& I will refer… inquisitive school ma’ams to Lieut. Maury.” While scholarshavegenerallydismissedHomer’s directive to consult a nineteenth-century oceanographer, I propose to take Homer for his word—tofollow the eponymous currentandto attend to the storms, ships, and creatures that moved through it.
This lecture interrogates Homer’s marines anew by focusing on the unique epistemology and materiality of the ocean.Thelatephotographer and theorist AllanSekulahas called the oceansa“forgotten space.” Indeed, art historians tend to look out to sea from the perspective of dry land, focusing onterrestrial makers and marketsdespite the many “global” turnsofour discipline. Attending to the sea not only brings us closer toHomer’sown experience(when ocean travel was the norm and shipwrecks featured in the daily papers),butalso raisesawareness to the fact that westilllive in a maritime world—a world where90% of global commodities are moved by ships.By connecting maritime spaces of the past and present, this talk will show that Homer’s marines are not just universal visions of nature’s power, as they are often understood, but are politically embedded innineteenth-centuryunderstandings ofimperialism and globalization—conditions that still govern the oceans today.
Maggie Cao is the David G. Frey Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a historian of eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art in a global context. Her research focuses on the history of globalization with particular interest in intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics. She is the author ofThe End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America(2018)andhasalsopublishedon such topics asmedia theory, material culture, and ecocriticism. She is currently writing a book on American painting and overseas empire building in the nineteenth century.
Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld) and Dr Tom Day (The Courtauld).
