American watercolors.(Current and coming)

Because they fade when exposed to light for long intervals, works on paper, including watercolors, should not be exhibited for long periods of time. Thus, when a museum chooses to place a selection of watercolors from its collection on view, it is generally an opportunity not to be missed. The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City last assembled a show of examples from its highly regarded permanent collection in the late spring of 1998. Now, nine years later, it is presenting a focused exhibition entitled Brushed with Light: American Landscape Watercolors from the Collection, which consists of eighty w ater-color landscapes and is on view from September 14 to January 13, 2008. The views were painted between 1777 and 1945 and include examples executed both by famous artists (among them, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and Thomas Eakins) and less well-known practitioners (such as Kai Gotzsche, Frances Palmer, George Tribe, and Rudolf Cronau).

Watercolor as a medium of choice took center stage in the 1870s and 1880s, when it was championed by the leading artists of the day, and some years later, when it was revived with equal enthusiasm by the early modernists in the 1920s. During the latter period water-color found its most vocal proponents in critics and curators, one of whom referred to it as "the American medium." The Brooklyn Museum was fully behind this movement, hosting an exhibition of hundreds of works by living artists in 1921, a show that was so successful that the curators organized biannual exhibitions until 1963. The museum was also one of the first to collect watercolors, purchasing ...