Fluid Capabilities

Watercolor painter Chris Larsen of Tucson has a mantra that he
diligently drums into all of his students.

“You need to get the first 100 bad watercolors out of the way,” he
tells them, “the sooner the better.”

Clearly, John Marin’s 100 bad paintings were well in his past by the
time he dashed off “New York Landscape.” It’s the single most beautiful
watercolor in the University of Arizona Museum of Art’s big summer
show, To Have the World in Hand: The Art of Watercolor.

Painted in 1920, when Marin was 50 years old, this luminous work
conjures up the New York City skyline. The artist looked at Manhattan
from the far side of the East River, peering through the swaying cables
of the Brooklyn Bridge. But his New York is like no other.

Instead of rigidly geometric skyscrapers, Marin’s Manhattan has fat,
amorphous blurs, with blue-violet brushstrokes tilting every which way.
In place of placid water, there are short jumps of a brush drenched in
blues and violets. The sky is a disrupted convocation of deep ochres,
reds and blues. The famous cathedral-like arches of the bridge are
there in their usual place, pointing toward the heavens, but they’re
quickly sketched, a loose wash of beige running outside Marin’s pencil
lines. Even the lone New Yorker in the scene, seated on a bench on the
Brooklyn Heights Promenade, is a barely discernible flash of blue and
red.

Marin clearly mastered the famously difficult art of watercolor, an
art predicated, as curator Lisa Fischman has elegantly written, “on the
pleasures and challenges of solubility, on the fluid capabilities of
pigment suspended in water.” Marin alternates between washes thick and
thin, between brushes wet and dry. His colors are never pallid (an
all-too-frequent watercolor sin, in Larsen’s eyes). In fact, in this
one quick painting, he demonstrates every watercolor technique in
Fischman’s checklist: “layers of wash, vivid coloring, staining,
delicacy of dilution, subtle nuances and graceful gestures.”

By the time he made this little painting, Marin was a well-known
modernist, but his training was traditional. Born in New Jersey in
1870, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in
Philadelphia, the oldest art school in the nation. The academy is known
for training young artists to paint very well, and Marin absorbed its
lessons of line, color and composition. He kept the skills but later
shuffled the rules, breaking free of the academy’s lush realism to
embrace joyous near-abstraction. His New York is a fractured
rapture.

This large show draws 61 works drawn from the museum’s own
collection. Fischman has hauled quantities of 19th-century watercolors
out of storage, and the old works demonstrate the way the medium was
handled before innovators like Marin came along. Many pieces are from
England, the European epicenter for watercolor a century and a half
ago.

Where Marin attacked his paper fast, splashing and pooling his
colors, traditional English watercolorists built up their paintings
slowly, layer upon layer. They first carefully drew the outlines in
pencil and then painted washes in between the lines, more or less,
waiting for each layer to dry before starting on the next.

David Cox Jr.’s large untitled landscape from 1853 is a good
example. An Englishman who lived from 1808 to 1885, Cox was a member of
the Royal Watercolour Society. Like many 19th-century gentlemen (and
ladies), Cox painted watercolors when he traveled. He favored pastoral
idylls. This one appears to be a Swiss scene. Snow-capped mountains
rise in the back; a charming mountain village of red roofs and spires
occupies the center ground; and picturesque peasants in straw hats and
smocks drive a herd of goats along a foreground path.

Cox has followed all the rules, to beautiful effect. Rendered in a
thin wash, his majestic mountains palely recede into the distance. He
left the facades of the cottages white, to convey the brilliance of sun
on whitewash. He obeyed the dictum always to put dark against light,
white cottage wall against dark green tree. He used a more loaded
brush—less water, more pigment—on the figures in the
foreground.

If you look closely at each house, each apron, though, you can see
the alluring looseness of his brushstrokes. Even a painting as
romantically realistic as this one is an abstraction at the cellular
level. Like Marin—and all painters—Cox has broken the
visible world down into symbols and strokes.

Fischman has done a fine job organizing the show
thematically—maritimes, landscapes, still lifes—and
highlighting the famous names. Raoul Dufy’s simple view of St. Mark’s,
“The Piazzetta, Venice,” not dated, is a beauty that falls halfway
between Cox and Marin. The Frenchman fluidly sketched in the outlines
of the near buildings, the water beyond and a church across the lagoon,
and then pooled in thin colored washes to bring them all to splendid
life. The splash of cerulean around a dome is lovely. Swiss artist Paul
Klee likewise has a small, radiant architectural piece, a cityscape
pungent in red.

Frederic Remington, the celebrity Western artist, has a series of
mouthwatering “Mexican Doorways,” painted entirely in ink wash, in a
spectrum of grays and white. A grouping of mid-20th-century Southwest
painters suggests Georgia O’Keeffe mixed with a dash of Thomas Hart
Benton’s regionalism. Eliot O’Hara’s “Tucson Landscape” from 1941 is a
boldly cubist rendering of our local mountains, their angular peaks and
rocks pictured in orange and brown.

At the more contemporary end, a German artist named Mario Reis, born
in 1953, painted “Daisy Creek, Montana,” an abstract watercolor on
cloth that mimics the light on muddy waters. Few women are in the
exhibition, a surprise considering that watercolor was long considered
a lady’s medium. One exception is Nancy Grossman, an American born in
1940. Her “Portrait of a Man,” 1975, is a watercolor cut up into strips
and artfully rearranged to create a manly head, chest and biceps.

Fischman also included a lovely desertscape by Douglas Denniston,
the late UA art professor who frequently rendered pale saguaros and
mountains in minimalist strokes. His “Untitled (Picacho Peak),” 1973,
has the exuberance of the Marin.

This lively summer show unfortunately will be UAMA’s last by chief
curator Fischman, whose four-year tenure at the museum ends June 30.
Museum director Charles Guerin has made a habit of ridding himself of
talented curators. Five years ago, he ousted Peter Briggs, a Latin
American art specialist who had staged many brilliant exhibitions over
his 14-year tenure.

The next year, Guerin hired Fischman. Like Briggs, a brainy Ph.D.,
Fischman embarked upon a series of stimulating exhibitions. Last
winter, she curated a memorable show of sculptures made from trash by
the African artist El Anatsui; the year before that, she presented Iona
Rozeal Brown, a challenging American artist who imposes
African-American hip-hop motifs on traditional Japanese woodcuts.

Guerin offered no excuse when he deprived Tucson of Peter Briggs’
talents. (Briggs has moved on to a distinguished chair at the Museum of
Texas Tech.) This time, Guerin’s hiding behind the budget freefall.
With a 19 percent cut in its budget, the museum eliminated a security
guard, an assistant curator of education and a PR person. An assistant
curator was retained but moved to soft money. The curator of education
was reduced to half-time.

But budgets always allow for choices, and Guerin is making the
untenable choice to eliminate the museum’s chief curator, and an
excellent one at that. He’s retaining plenty of other staff. He, of
course, will be protected. He’s the decider: He announced that he will
be chief curator as well as director from now on.

This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2009.