The American watercolor in the 1920s

Magazine Antiques, March, 1998 by Barbara Dayer Gallati

Unlike the movement of the 1880s, which was led by the artists themselves, the revival of the 1920s owed its energy largely to the perceptions of curators and critics. They responded to substantial activity in watercolor painting by attempting for the first time to establish a separate national history for the medium. Symptomatic of the heightened interest was an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (now the Brooklyn Museum of Art) in 1921 entitled simply A Group Exhibition of Water Color Paintings by American Artists. The show, which brought together 365 works by fifty-four artists, was, according to the catalogue of the same title, an

effort to bring before the American public as many of the meritorious water colors of American design and of recent date as the capacity of the Brooklyn Museum galleries will allow...[to demonstrate] that the growing popularity of water color painting rests on a firm foundation.(2)

The exhibition was on view for only slightly more than a month, but it had a lasting influence on the history of watercolor in the United States, for it generated a spate of critical commentary that influenced the development of the canon that currently defines American watercolor history for this century. The shows overwhelming success led to the museum's ground-breaking series of biennial watercolor exhibitions that lasted until 1963.

By 1921 the Brooklyn Museum had established itself as a center for collecting and displaying watercolors. In 1900 the museum had purchased Jacques Joseph Tissot's Life of Christ, a series of 5 oils, 345 watercolors, and 111 pen and ink drawings that Tissot executed between 1886 and 1894. In 1909 the museum acquired eighty-three of the eighty-six watercolors that Sargent exhibited at Knoedler Galleries in New York City that year, making it the first American institution to collect a large group of Sargent watercolors. In 1912 the museum acquired twelve watercolors from Homer's estate, and in 1915 it staged the first comprehensive exhibition of Homer's work in that medium. These events were potent factors in shaping the museum's reputation, as witnessed by a letter from the photographer, editor, and dealer Alfred Stieglitz to the museum's director:

The Brooklyn Museum I had frequently heard of, but had never been there. It had bought a block of Sargent's water colors. It had bought the Tissot biblical drawings. It had bought many Winslow Homer watercolors....Such was my visualization whenever I heard the name Brooklyn Museum.(3)

The work of Homer (see Pl. III) and Sargent (see Pl. IV) provided the foundation for the 1921 exhibition, with the artists represented by seventeen and twenty works respectively. This positioned them at the end of the historical period for watercolor and the point from which the modern watercolor was launched.

While the over-all selection of works emphasized contemporary trends, a small, rather eccentrically chosen group of examples by other late nineteenth-century artists such as Robert Blum, J. Alden Weir, and John La Farge (see Pl. VI) was included to represent milestones of the recent past. Most abundant, however, were works by contemporary practitioners, many of them specialists in watercolor. Shaped by the belief that artists could not be fairly represented by a single example, the installation consisted of groups of three to twenty works by each painter. This policy limited the number of artists whose work was displayed while at the same time offering an unusual opportunity to gauge the relative power of individual artists within a larger context.

Critical reaction was immediate and copious. Henry McBride remarked on the "novelty to run across such Satanic ironies as Charles Burchfield's watercolors in a museum" (Pl. VIII), and the "bold drawings" of Rockwell Kent (Pl. V).(4) Among the "discoveries" were the work of Joseph Pennell (see Pl. VII) and Dodge Macknight (see Pl. IX). Pennell's twenty views from his Brooklyn window overlooking New York Harbor drew both praise and condemnation depending on whether the critic was an academic or a modernist. Elisabeth Luther Cary in the New York Times hailed Pennell's watercolors for their "extraordinary authority in the use of the medium and still more extraordinary freshness and eagerness of vision."(5) Henry Tyrrell, writing in the New York Sunday World, was less reserved:

If there were a grand surprise medal it would go to Joseph Pennell for his score of lovely little Whisterlerian symphonies and nocturnes, glimpsed "Out of a Brooklyn Window." Who would ever have expected this of pragmatical Joseph Pennell, the hard-boiled etcher, lithographer and critic!(6)

Understandably, the Whistlerian delicacies of Pennell's work did not fare well with modernist critics, whose worship of urban dynamism (a correlate of modernist attitudes) found no satisfaction in Pennell's treatment of such modern icons as the Woolworth Building or the Brooklyn Bridge, both in New York City.

Macknight's art found advocates on both sides of the aesthetic divide. The work of this Cape Cod-based watercolor specialist was nearly unknown outside of Boston, chiefly because his nearly annual exhibitions of new work there sold out immediately. Although three of his radiant watercolors had been on view in the 1913 Armory Show, they were undoubtedly overlooked because of the sheer number and notoriety of the works with which they competed for attention. Essentially the 1921 Brooklyn exhibition introduced Macknight's art to a new audience and considerable critical notice. Possibly the most positive commentary was written by the artist Marsden Hartley, who admired the painter's "feats of visual bravery," which consisted of "virility of technique" and "a passion for impressionistic veracity which heightens his own work to a point distinctly above that of Sargent, and one might almost say above Winslow Homer."(7) Hartley's sentiments were not, however, universally echoed even among his associates in Alfred Stieglitz's circle. The photographer Paul Strand, for example, found fault with Macknight's (and Sargent's) watercolors because they provided "the mere external record of objectivity looked at and not a vision of the forces which animate that objectivity."(8)