June 30, 1976
The major summer exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum, Eastern Parkway and Washington Avenue, is American Watercolors and Pastels from The Museum Collection, on view July 3 through September 19. Paralleling the Museum’s famed American painting collection in breadth and diversity, the watercolor and pastel holdings present a historical survey of American work in the media. One hundred examples from the late eighteenth century to the present have been installed in the Museum’s Robert B. Blum Gallery by Sarah Faunce, Curator of Painting and Sculpture.
The earliest work in the exhibition is from a series of Views of America painted in 1777 by Captain William Pierie. William J. Bennett’s View on the Potomac, about 1834, continues Pierie’s topographical interest with a more accomplished handling of the medium. Three watercolors by George Harvey, painted in the 1830’s, were part of a series which explored the special qualities of atmosphere found in North America; they are early examples of the concern with light and air that became a preoccupation of later American watercolorists like Winslow Homer, W. T. Richards, John Singer Sargent, Francis A. Silva, and Thomas Eakins, all represented here. Other important nineteenth-century artists with both watercolors and pastels on view are William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, and Theodore Robinson.
Early twentieth-century interest in watercolor is demonstrated here with works by Charles Demuth, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Lyonel Feininger. Of special interest is “Blue Series,” four 1917 abstract paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe. Later artists shown are Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Tobey and Milton Avery. Younger contemporaries working with watercolor in varied ways are included as well.
Many of the works have not been exhibited for several years. A number of them have been recently cleaned and treated under a conservation program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1975, 008. View Original
