Bob Keyes’ piece on the Portland Museum of Art’s coming autumn exhibition was well put together. I especially appreciated the final three paragraphs.

However, I disagree with Adam Gopnik, who wrote an essay for the exhibition catalogue of “Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington,” which runs from Sept. 25 to Nov. 29. Gopnik wrote: “To criticize Americans like Homer and Remington for self-fashioning and myth-making and blurring the lines between reportage and myths, fact and fiction, is to describe them as … Americans.”

Gopnik should have written “is to describe them as WHITE Americans.” Jay Gatsby is the exemplar of “self-fashioning and myth-making and blurring the lines between reportage and myths, fact and fiction.” Gatsby, wandering the north shore of Lake Superior (later the North Shore of Long Island), with his lean, tanned body and native smarts about Superior’s weather, was the very picture of a Remington or Homer hero.

He fashioned himself into a Platonic ideal, gave himself a fantasy-laden origin myth, and strove – oh how he strove – to place himself at the pinnacle of American society alongside Tom Buchanan. And failed.

Meanwhile, Blacks are almost completely excluded from Homer’s canvas, and Native Americans are trampled by the conquering whites of Remington’s.

It is no wonder that Langston Hughes’ 1935 lines can recall the times of Remington and Homer, and still resonate today:

“O yes,
I say it plain
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath:
America will be!”

Chalmers Hardenbergh
Freeport

Copy the Story Link