Word: watercolor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Watercolor: today, the word seems prim and dilute. It suggests Aunt Mabel, poking at her holiday sketchbook in some Tuscan piazza. Oils for real artists, watercolor for amateurs-so the common prejudice runs. Yet in the 18th and 19th centuries, some of the best painting in Europe was done in watercolor. The brilliant achievements of English art in particular, from Rowlandson to Turner, were largely based on the freedom, speed and unique sparkle of the transparent wash. One forgets what the medium could do. Last week the Pierpont Morgan Library produced a salutary reminder, in the form of a show...
...watercolor has two roots. One is in pen-and-wash drawing, the other in the more static and ceremonious art of miniature painting. The first item in the Morgan catalogue is a painting of an imaginary noble savage, A Young Daughter of the Picts, by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. Le Moyne, a French artist who worked in England in the 16th century, voyaged to Florida in the early 1560s. There he saw Indians-and concluded that there had to be a likeness between them and the lost tribes of primitive Britain. Hence the delicate Amazon, who might have stepped...
Nature Worship. Watercolor came fully into its own as a medium two centuries later-through nature rather than culture. The two great themes of English art in the 18th and 19th centuries were antiquity and landscape. Both necessitated some form of travel-either taking the road to Rome or making the shorter trip into the English countryside, with painting kit. Oil paint in tubes made Impressionism possible, but that sort of packaging did not exist in the 18th century. Lugging oils through the vales of Kent or the gorges of Switzerland was messy, and watercolor-carried dry, in little pans...
...been claimed by feelings." It has always been thus, even when the U.S. was a complete wilderness and artists were merely its sensitive surveyors. In 1585, for example, John White was sent to the New World to "bring back descriptions of beasts, birds, fishes, trees, townes, etc." His watercolor of Indians fishing in Virginia gives not only the basic facts but the artist's response as well-enchantment...
Stage, you gave me the light in which to scintillate but took away the soft shadow and the subtle gleam...I was painting great placards, rationalizing slyly that a watercolor can hardly be seen in a large hall...I began to cherish not quietness-- but thunder, and when you do this it is easy to go wrong. --Yevgeny Yevtushenko, from "The Stage...