Abstract Watercolours by 14 Americans

In many periods watercolour as a medium has been relegated to a relatively minor position in art, employed chiefly for studies, sketches, and anecdotic jottings of landscape or feature. Its chief virtues in these periods have been its lightness, its quickness, its casual immediacy it was considered the “Sunday outing” of artistic media, and as recently as the Victorian era young ladies were encouraged to employ it, with the more or less implicit understanding that it was not as messy an artistic implement as most.

Today, with the movement away from “rendering” towards a more inventive and more personal idiom, American artists have taken up the various watercolour media, including gouache, combinations of watercolour and oil, and more especially newly developed plastic paints, to explore new areas of imagery and of colour effects available only through the peculiar properties of these water media. The physical properties of transparency, the ability to flood, drip, and overlay, the effects of various degrees of wetness and of stain on the paper itself, present a considerable range of possibility for the artist. It is characteristic of each of the artists represented here to find inspiration in the unique qualities of their materials, and in so doing they have made watercolour an intrinsic, rather than peripheral, contributor to the total meaning of their work. Artists in the exhibition include Lee Krasner, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler and Matsumi Kanemitsu.

FRANK O’HARA, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.