Exhibition catalog essays explore the power of watercolors
“What do watercolors capture about ourselves and the world we live in that can’t be expressed in any other medium?” The question is posed in a new book accompanying an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums. “American Watercolors, 1880-1990: Into the Light” (Yale University) is less history and more exploration, of the form, the process, the appeal, and the place it has in American art over the course of a century. The book and exhibition feature familiar masters: Winslow Homer’s sailboats, sunsets, and canoes; a gauzy mountainscape by John Singer Sargent; an elegant Edward Hopper lighthouse. There’s a sense of motion in a work by Bill Traylor, and some early Mark Rothkos that surprise in their departure from his saturated color swaths. A fluidity defines the medium, a flowing uncontainment; it’s a “uniquely democratic” form. Agnes Martin is there, and Claes Oldenburg, and Alexander Calder. Susan Frecon’s works have a sculptural energy. Some paintings have the intimate feel of the sketchbook, the fleeting sense of water, brush, and shifting light. Richard Foster Yarde’s “Cunard Street” has a languid sensuality, and a Philip Guston watercolor from 1964 is scribbled thick, stormy, and dark. The contextualizing essays ask questions, provoke thought, and maybe watercolor stirs more philosophy than other forms. “If there is a start in the material world,” writes Richard Tuttle, “there must be an end that is known as an opposite condition. All else is hidden. If we know this, what else in the world needs to be explained, through watercolor, or not? Watercolor, as an open tool, relies on its power to contradict.” The exhibition runs through Aug. 13 at the Harvard Art Museums.