 "Photo: Barns, by Oscar Bluemner")
They can be used to capture the scintillations and refractions on a pond’s surface in spring, or to playfully experiment with the lighting on ripe tomatoes. Regardless of subject matter, watercolor provides a medium through which artists can realistically experiment with light. The incredibly sensitive pigments of watercolors have been utilized by centuries of artists from across the world to capture glimmer, sheen, ray and luster.
The works of such artists will be displayed in the Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center (FLLAC) in a summer exhibit titled Catching Light: European and American Watercolors from the Permanent Collection. The exhibition will display 47 different watercolor paintings from Vassar College’s permanent collection from the 18th through the 20th centuries. The exhibit will open Friday, May 8 with a lecture at 5:30 p.m. by Linda S. Ferber, the Senior Art Historian, Museum Director and Executive Vice President at the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS). Her talk will be followed with a reception in the FLLAC atrium at 6:30 p.m. The exhibition will last until July 29.
The paintings that will be featured in “Catching Light” have been amassed by Vassar College through purchases and donations. Reverend Elias Lyman Magoon was responsible for giving the first of the approximately 1,000 watercolor paintings the school has collected. The Baptist minister was one of Vassar’s charter trustees and gave Matthew Vassar hundreds of paintings in the 1850s for the College’s young art collection.
The idea behind the exhibition stemmed from a single painting from the permanent collection, Hilda Belcher’s “The Checkered Dress (Portrait of O’Keefe).” “The portrait of Georgia O’Keefe is one of the paintings I stumbled across when I first came here and looked at everything in the collection,” said Patricia Phagan, the Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at the FLLAC and creator of “Catching Light.” “It’s one of the ones I really remember. It’s just so well executed,” she said.
Phagan was subsequently inspired to display the Belcher and other watercolors to give the paintings their due admiration. Many of the paintings have never been exhibited before. “There is no record of the Belcher on exhibit,” said Phagan. “This exhibit will change that.”
Linda Ferber will give a lecture to mark the opening of the exhibit. Ferber is considered one of today’s primary scholars of American art history, and she will discuss the background of watercolor painting in the United States in her lecture talk. Ferber has 35 years of museum experience, having been the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art and Chairman of the American Art Department at the Brooklyn Museum of Art before joining the N-YHS. She organized a variety of exhibitions while at the Brooklyn Museum, including one similar to “Catching Light,” called “Masters of Color and Light: Homer, Sargent and the American Watercolor Movement.”
The exhibition will foreground the different ways how watercolors have been used over the years, a topic Ferber will also discuss in her lecture. In the classical piece “Church of the Annunciation at Vico Equense on the Bay of Naples,” John Ruskin first printed an image of the church over a dark seascape and then painted over the sketch with watercolors, a common technique used by English artists. This method contrasts with the techniques used by Oscar Bluemner in his modernist piece “Barns,” an abstract interpretation of a farmhouse’s architecture using bright colors and loose shapes.
“Many modernists like Bluemner used watercolors to dissect the things they see while painting into central shapes and colors,” said Phagan.
Later techniques of painting with watercolors emphasize spontaneity and liberation. Max Beckmann’s 1947 watercolor titled “Nachtmusik” is a very kinetic representation of a gander through his window in the artist’s St. Louis apartment. Jim Dine’s appropriately-named piece “Tomatoes” uses lights in very playful and experimental modes to accentuate the still life he portrays.
Paintings that are likely to catch the eye of students include “Bacharach on the Rhine” by British landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner’s landscape emphasizes the intimacy and atmosphere of the German riverside vista. There is also American modern artist John Marin’s incredibly energetic “Woods,” an abstract exploration of pure energy.
A favorite of Phagan’s is an esoteric album cover by British painter John Everett Millais depicting a gathering of religious figures. The piece is dated 1843, when Milais would have been 12 years old and attending the Royal Academy of the Arts in London. Not much more is known about the cover. “It’s the piece that intrigues me the most,” said Phagan. “It reminds me of William Blake’s illustrations for the Book of Job. It’s a piece I’m trying to find out more about.”
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