Displaying items by tag: watercolors

Mexican painter Diego Rivera may be known to many for his stunning murals, but an exhibition opening Dec. 12 at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana looks at his skill working with watercolors.

"Popol Vuh: Watercolors of Diego Rivera" features 17 works on loan from the Museo Casa Diego Rivera in the artist's hometown of Guanajuato.

There's something about watercolor painting that seems a perfect fit for a summer exhibition – perhaps the watery way the paint absorbs into the paper is as cooling as a dip in a refreshing lake.

Even though most of us played with water-based paint in school, it is nonetheless intriguing to learn that "watercolor paint is a finely ground pigment suspended in an aqueous solution of gum Arabic, made from the sap of the acacia tree." This all comes to life in Painting on Paper: American Watercolors at Princeton, on view through Aug. 30 at the Princeton University Art Museum.

Only a short time remains for a special exhibition of the work of American modernist Gershon Benjamin (1899-1985), a Romanian-born, Montreal-educated artist remembered as an Expressionist for his individualistic style and use of color. The exhibition, Gershon Benjamin: Modern Master features more than 60 portraits, still lifes, landscapes and city scenes in oil, watercolor and charcoal—all representing more than seven decades of work.

Benjamin was part of a 1920s New York scene of progressive artists who favored European modernism to the popular American Scene and Regionalist art of the day.

RINCETON, NJ.- Rarely on view due to their sensitivity to light, the Princeton University Art Museum’s extensive holdings of American watercolors are distinguished by their quality and breadth as well as by the institution’s sustained commitment to the collection’s growth over time. Painting on Paper: American Watercolors at Princeton presents 90 selections from this remarkable collection, supplemented by select loans, providing a potent overview of American art as well as a survey of the importance and evolution of watercolor painting in the U.S. since the early 19th century.

Among the noted artists included in the exhibition are John James Audubon, Milton Avery, Charles Burchfield, Alexander Calder, Dorothy Dehner, Charles Demuth, Richard Diebenkorn, Arthur Dove, Thomas Eakins, Sam Francis, William Glackens, Adolph Gottlieb, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Claes Oldenburg, Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, Ben Shahn, James McNeill Whistler, and Andrew Wyeth.

Though “Dance: Movement, Rhythm, Spectacle” occupies just one large room (arranged to feel like three) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it seems to open windows in many directions. Its exhibits range from the 1890s to the 1980s, vividly demonstrating how radically that century brought change to social dance, dance theater and ideas of dance in art. Diversely diverse, the show, which opened this month, offers a panoply of artistic media (photographs, paintings, watercolors, prints, woodcuts, etchings, graphite drawings, lithographs and film), dancers of various races and a huge assortment of dance costumes.

It is rare for private collections of American paintings, drawings, and watercolors to span the entire nineteenth century—from America’s artistic development in the Federal period to the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century. It’s rarer still when the collection is coupled with American sculpture spanning the same period, particularly considering that there were few American sculptors of note for much of the first half of the century. The art within this East Coast private collection encompass paintings by Trumbull and Stuart to Chase and Sargent and sculpture from Houdon to Saint-Gaudens.

Most American sculpture of the early nineteenth century consists of portraits that celebrate the founding fathers of the nation. As such they complement paintings of the period which, while also recording the likenesses of the early patriots, include historical events, often battles...

To continue reading this article about nineteenth-century sculpture, visit InCollect.com.

Two Cézanne sketches found by conservators at the Barnes Foundation earlier this year went on view at the collection in Philadelphia today. The unfinished works were discovered on the backs of two of Cézanne’s landscapes, “The Chaine de L’Etoile Mountains” (1885–86) and “Trees” (1900), during a routine conservation treatment in 2014. The Barnes Foundation will display the watercolors in double-sided frames, allowing viewers to compare Cézanne’s finished, polished products with his incomplete works-in-progress.

The conservation session that yielded the discovery was headed by Barbara Buckley, senior director of conservation and chief conservator of paintings at the Barnes, with help from conservators from the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts.

Alice Neel is best known for her portraits which, with their controlled painterly drama and psychological nuance, are complete and polished formal statements in a classical genre. Her drawings and watercolors, or at least the 62 in this absorbing show, are closer to diary entries. Ruminative, confiding, sometimes startlingly unguarded in emotion, they add up to a self-portrait sketched in private over some 50 years.

The earliest watercolors from the 1920s establish a period mood; they present the New York City that greeted a young artist when she arrived there at age 27 with a Cuban-born husband who would soon leave her and their infant, a daughter, who would soon die.

John James Audubon painted many birds, but for sheer stage presence, his great gray owl is hard to beat. Perched on a rotten branch, it turns halfway, as though disturbed, and fixes the viewer with an imperious stare. The yellow eyes glow, their intensity magnified by concentric ringlike markings that spread outward, like a feathery vortex. The plumage is regal — thick drapery, in a gray and brown pattern, falling in soft folds. The owl exudes the heavy solemnity of one of Velázquez’s popes or Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More.

The owl has stiff competition in “Audubon’s Aviary: The Final Flight.”