West to Wesselmann: American Drawings and Watercolors in the Princeton University Art Museum

This major retrospective from the permanent collection of the Princeton University Art Museum features 77 American masterpieces from the 18th through the 20th centuries. Organized by nationally acclaimed art historian and Princeton University professor John Wilmerding, also a visiting curator in the department of American art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, and Laura M. Giles, the curator of prints and drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum, "West to Wesselmann: American Drawings and Watercolors in the Princeton University Art Museum" articulates a survey of American art through the dual mediums of drawing and watercolor. From the drawings of Benjamin West to Tom Wesselmann's evocative Pop art imagery, the exhibition charts its course through three galleries of the Princeton University Art Museum and all of the major stylistic movements. "The museum's collection is impressive in both scope and quality," says Wilmerding, "providing a comprehensive overview of the nation's artistic traditions."

With particular strengths in the Hudson River and Ashcan schools, "West to Wesselmann" also features works on paper from folk artists, the American Pre-Raphaelites, Gilded Age artists, the Stieglitz circle, realists, Regionalists, cartoonists, and post-World War II and contemporary artists. Included in the exhibition are drawings, watercolors, and sketchbooks by Thomas Cole, Charles Herbert Moore, Eastman Johnson, Thomas Moran, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Jackson Pollock. On view at the Princeton University Art Museum through January 9, "West to Wesselmann" will travel to the Musee d'Art Americain, in Giverny, France (April 1 through July 3), and to the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta (April 3, 2006, through June 25).

When Princeton's department of art history and archaeology was established in 1883, it was the first of its kind in the United States. Plans for a "Museum of Historic Art," now the Princeton University Art Museum, were drawn up simultaneously, signaling the university's early dedication to the discipline of art history. Today the museum's collection of American works on paper (including collages and prints) totals over 4,000 pieces. "The museum's impressive collection of American art reflects Princeton University's pioneering role in establishing art history as a discipline in the United States, and its commitment to collecting art as a crucial component of its educational philosophy," says Susan M. Taylor, the director of the Princeton University Art Museum. "The collection has evolved over the years to respond to contemporary scholarship in the field, and this is reflected in the exhibition and the accompanying publication, which reaffirms the museum's role as a teaching institution and its commitment to advancing the field of art history."

Established in the 1930s by the museum's first director, Frank Jewett Mather Jr., Princeton's collection of American drawings and watercolors numbers over 1,300 works and is widely considered to be among the best university collections of its kind in the country.

"Mather went after extremely interesting things, regardless of period," says Wilmerding. "He revived or rediscovered artists like Charles Herbert Moore and Homer Dodge Martin, who were both virtually obscure. There was nothing about them in the canon or in existing textbooks, so that's why Mather is so interesting. In the 20th century, he bought 19th century."

Princeton's collection continues to grow, in large part through the generosity of alumni, faculty, and other charitable donors. "A university museum is a little bit different from a general public museum," Wilmerding surmises, "in that it's dependent, in large part, on the quirks of individual faculty or museum people, and, above all, on alumni donors." According to Wilmerding, the museum did not actively start buying or requesting works in a schematic way until about 10 or 15 years ago. "We looked to fill holes," he says. "We looked to acquire artists that we didn't have, or subjects that we didn't have." Cucumbers (ca. 1860) by John William Hill, a recent acquisition, illustrates this point. "When we found that," Wilmerding says, "that was a clear target for acquisition, because we had virtually no still life in the collection."

Until recently, works on paper were largely undervalued--in part because of their extreme fragility, which prevents them from being kept on continuous display. Considered to be secondary to other works of art, "they got put away, and so forth," remarks Wilmerding. Yet drawings and watercolor paintings are extremely valuable as teaching documents, presenting a telling directness and immediacy that can expose the hand of the artist to a greater extent than can their more "finished," full-scale counterparts. Even deteriorating drawings on brittle, age-darkened paper can prove revelatory, providing new insights into an artist's working method and greater oeuvre. The contrasts between the lights and darks of a drawing often become exaggerated over time, sometimes amplifying a viewer's ability to appreciate an artist's draftsmanship. "For a university teaching collection, to be able to call attention to issues of paper, medium, condition, and change over time--those are minor, but in a sense, very interesting points," Wilmerding says.

The selection of works is perhaps the single most important element in compiling a successful exhibition, particularly one such as "West to Wesselmann," which aims to create an awareness of a larger and more extensive collection. "How do you make a selection?" muses Wilmerding. "Well, the selection is made on the basis of balance and chronology, major artists, beautiful works, quality, and condition."

The importance of this last consideration--the condition of a work--is most noticeable in the first gallery, which features the earliest selection of works. Many of the drawings and paintings here are striking for their delicacy, even fragility, and perhaps none more so than Sarah Hoding's charming still life Bough Apple (1819). An homage to the myths of transplantation and nation-founding, this still life of the nonindigenous apple, rendered in neutral space, gestures to the emerging field of natural history at the time of its creation while exhibiting a serene, almost portraitlike quality. As Diana K. Tuite, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of art and archaeology at Princeton, summarizes the pristine rendering in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, it is as an "imprint of nature upon a page."

Nature dominates the first section of "West to Wesselmann," though mainly in the form of landscapes. By the 1820s, landscape painting had captured popular consciousness. Both feeding and feeding off of a kind of cult of the wilderness in the American psyche, landscape painting quickly became national painting. Thomas Cole, the first of the Hudson River School painters, translated themes previously limited to genres such as history and religious painting into his landscapes, uniting the real and the ideal in images that captured the physical strength and spiritual power of the American wilderness. In Crawford Notch (1839), a preparatory sketchbook study for the subsequent canvas of that same year, A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch), Cole alludes to the fateful demise of the Samuel Willey family, killed by an avalanche in the valley pass of their homestead, by illustrating the family's presence in--or intrusion upon--the natural world. By dramatically exaggerating the size of Mount Webster and the destructive effects of civilization (such as in the rotting tree stumps in the foreground), Cole ponders the awesome supremacy of a majestic, yet terrible Nature, the consequences of man's presence in the natural world, and the decay of time.

Although Cole accomplished the study of Crawford Notch on-site, he completed the painting later in his studio. "[Cole] went back to New York," Wilmerding notes, "and in the studio did his painting. In the painting, he adjust[s] the contours of the hillside to compress, to synthesize the subject." The practice of creating composite (studio) images from plein air sketches was commonplace among early Hudson River School painters; but by the late 1840s and '50s, interest in plein air work for its own sake, and the creation of more factual records of space, time, light, and foliage, began to develop. Commenting on the transition, in terms of the drawings in the installation, Wilmerding notes, "And so by this point, what you're watching is the evolution from drawing that is sketching--that is clearly preparatory, that is note-taking--to drawing that is considered an art form in its own right."

Later Hudson River School painters demonstrated an interest in more precise rendering than their forebears, an interest that would eventually come to a head in the work of the American Pre-Raphaelites. Believing that careful inspection of the natural world could reveal the presence of the divine, the Pre-Raphaelites meticulously recorded natural minutiae in works that, at times, approached near photographic realism. In Pine Tree (1868), by Charles Herbert Moore, a sublimely portrayed object of nature takes on a striking, almost abstract quality. A suiting allegory to human life, Moore's evergreen, a tree notable for its seasonal endurance, climbs to the sun with grace and elegance, despite its visible imperfections. "

Around the same time (1870s), watercolor began coming into its own as a medium for serious practice and "finished" work. Three decades earlier, Seth Eastman had conveyed the "logic" of landscape in Mississippi River, near Fort Snelling, Minnesota (1841), an expansive watercolor panorama that belied its small size. Falling somewhere between Cole's romanticism and the later specificity of the Pre-Raphaelites, Eastman anticipated the more fluid, generalized wash of watercolor to come. Up until the middle of the 19th century, American artists used watercolor in what Wilmerding calls "a very tight way." Sometimes referred to as "colored drawings," these watercolors lack the fluid-wash transparency and liberation that characterizes later works in the medium. "By mid-century," Wilmerding recounts, "artists were using watercolor out-of-doors more and more, and exploiting spontaneous brushwork. In one sense, watercolor becomes national, in that it responds to the American obsession with landscape, and with nature and geography."

Kathleen A. Foster, the Robert L. McNeil Jr. curator of American art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, goes further. "There was a phenomenal increase in the interest in watercolor painting in New York and in the United States in the 1870s," she says, "and the whole phenomenon seems to have been sparked by a little club, the New York Water Color Club, the forerunner of the present American Watercolor Society." Foster argues that when the "little band of brothers" from the club began to solicit entrants for their annual show, the event quickly "snowballed," in her words, "in a totally unexpected and amazing fashion, such that by the middle of the 1870s, practically everybody who was anybody was making watercolors." The medium--and the movement--held a distinctively American appeal. As Foster notes, there were many artists--among them landscape painters, designers of stained glass and ceramics, illustrators, and women at home, all of whom were considered to be something of second-class artists--who were thrilled to have watercolor made into a serious medium. "You had a lot of artists who had been marginalized, who suddenly were invited to the ball, so to speak, and that, I think, also accounted for the huge popularity [of the medium]."

Less expensive to collect and less costly to use, watercolor was also something of a democratic medium. It quickly became identified with painting, articulating, and documenting figures, local scenery, and national sights and landmarks, all of which were so important to the burgeoning concept of "Americanness" in the years following the Civil War.

"There is a natural break in American art in the Civil War period," Wilmerding asserts, explaining that works of this period exhibit a raw awareness of mortality, a new cosmopolitanism, and a fresh type of realism. "The most obvious division that occurs, just in terms of the installation here, is that you move from this overwhelming sense of landscape, which dominates subject matter up until the [18]50s and '60s back to the human figure." According to Wilmerding, American art relies--in a general sense--on imagery of the human figure, on the one hand, and imagery of nature, on the other. "And that's a kind of cliche," he remarks, "but here [in the exhibition] it is true." In the founding years of the country, Wilmerding notes, the human figure dominated in history and heroic paintings and portraits, while in the Jacksonian period, it became the focus of genre painting. Much later, academic, figural drawing would show up again in 20th-century abstraction.
"By the [18]60s and '70s, the human figure comes back in a very strong way," he says. "The human figure and the interest in the down-to-earth become the new subject matter in the rise of the Industrial Age after the Civil War."

Winslow Homer's The Trysting Place (1875) and Thomas Eakins' Seventy Years Ago (1877), two of the museum's most prized works, are included in this section of the show. "I guess we shouldn't pass by the Homer and Eakins," Wilmerding muses, "as these would be considered, I think, to be among the key masterpieces in the collection." Produced almost simultaneously, the works demonstrate their makers' interest in similar subjects: the Colonial revival, costuming, and domestic concerns. The works also employ a comparable tightness in their rendering of their lone meditative figures, while a looser, almost impressionistic quality prevails in their respective backgrounds.
Also included in the second and largest gallery of the exhibition are Homer's Eastern Point Light (1880), John La Farge's Study of Afterglow From Nature (Tahiti: Entrance to Tautira Valley) (1891), and John Singer Sargent's The Tyrol (1914). In Eastern Point Light, Homer, working wet-in-wet, makes dramatic use of the white paper to emphasize light effects, water, and atmosphere. Like The Trysting Place, the tone is meditative, but while the former work is softly pensive, the latter is more darkly brooding, emotive, and austere. The picture has strange imbalances and asymmetries that expose Homer's interest in Japonisme, a fascination he shared with his friend La Farge. A watercolor study for a large oil painting, which also exhibits strange imbalances, La Farge's Study of Afterglow From Nature "speaks to the variety of functions or purposes of watercolor," Wilmerding says, by exhibiting a "free, exotic, romantic use of the washes."

If Sargent's washes are similarly free, his taut construction in The Tyrol is disparately unyielding. "There is a personal undertone in this work," remarks Giles, referring to the period in which Sargent was stranded in the Austrian (now Italian) Tyrol at the outbreak World War I. Although the artist remained prolific during his entrapment, one gets a sense from this work, in particular, of confinement. "You can't move beyond this mountain," Giles continues, "and although [Sargent] could have dealt with this [subject] more precisely, so that you could identify the site, or as more of a postcard, ... he turns it into something much more abstract and ominous."

Hanging across the gallery from, and in stark contrast to, Sargent's somber landscape is Everett Shinn's playful New York Street in Winter (1935). Shinn, a member of Robert Henri's Ashcan School, foregrounds a snowball fight in (and beneath) the telling intersection of the horse and the horseless carriage, which occupy the shadowy top-half of the work. This gritty, yet charming, urban spectacle, with its cast of scarf-bedecked characters, conveys a sense of movement, particularly in the blurred figures in the background, that is so reminiscent of the stage that one is immediately reminded of Shinn's affinity for the theater.

Theatrics--of a sort--surrounded Georgia O'Keeffe's titling of Narcissa's Last Orchid (1940), an extraordinary and sensuous work in pastel. When O'Keeffe drew but forgot to thank her friend, Narcissa Swift King, for the gift of an orchid, King playfully replied that the flower would be the last the artist would ever receive from her--hence the titling of the work. "I know it sounds apocryphal," says Giles, referring to the odd story, "but it's absolutely true."

Two of the most striking aspects of "West to Wesselmann"--beyond the included works themselves--are the exhibition's outstanding layout and its attention to minute detail. In preparation for the opening, for instance, a paper conservator painstakingly removed mold from a strangely "fuzzy" chair leg in Eakins' Seventy Years Ago; while Mary Cassatt's triumphant Young Woman in a Black and Green Bonnet, Looking Down (ca. 1890), which illustrates the watercolorlike fluidity and freshness of pastel, received a reproduction frame that Cassatt's contemporary Edgar Degas would have favored. These touches, in combination with the careful placement of the art, ensured an authentic display, as well as an informative and insightful presentation. For example, works by the exhibition's two most famous female artists--Cassatt and O'Keeffe--hang on opposite sides of a large baffle in the center of the second gallery. While the Cassatt appears to look back over the 19th-century works that surround it, the photographic and provocative Narcissa's Last Orchid grows forward from the reverse side, metaphorically opening the 20th century in the third gallery beyond.

The most diverse group of works in the exhibition is on display in the final gallery and includes realist watercolors, Pop art, and drawings by Abstract Expressionists. More so than in the previous century, art in 20th-century America exposes a certain determination to work out problems on paper--whether to adapt European forms to the American grain, or to solve the puzzles of abstraction or self-representation. As art historian Carol Troyen famously commented, "Much of the battle for
modern art in America was waged on paper."

The psychological complexity of this final group is readily apparent in an untitled drawing by Jackson Pollock (ca. 1939–1940). As Wilmerding notes of this work, one of the so-called "psychiatric drawings," here Pollock is looking at Picasso and working out his own psychotherapy. "[The work] clearly leads into Cubism coming into American painting with Arshile Gorky and developing the ground stages for the full flourishing of Abstract Expressionism, represented here by two major figures: Robert Motherwell and David Smith," he says. In David Smith's sculptural Untitled (1967), taut, rigorous, and balanced brushwork yields what Smith himself described in a 1955 lecture at Tulane University as "the pureness of statement, the honesty of expression ... laid bare in a black-and-white answer of who that mark-maker is."

A similar "purity of statement"--and manifestation of the "mark-maker"--characterizes a very different, though perhaps equally complex painting: Edward Hopper"s Universalist Church (1926). Painted in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a busy New England fishing port and seaside tourist attraction, Universalist Church, with its tight confinement of perspective and cameralike focus, might be called the very essence of Hopper. There is a striking sense of isolation about the old colonial tower of the church, cast in a familiar glare of sunlight, an isolation that characterizes many of the turrets, belfries, towers, and lighthouses throughout Hopper's oeuvre. As Wilmerding points out, Hopper was more than six feet tall and a very reclusive man. "Ultimately, it is tempting," he writes of Lighthouse Hill (1927) in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, "to think of the tall, isolated lighthouse as an architectural portrait of Hopper himself, a possibly less than conscious emblem of his own austere and reticent personality."

Hopper's interest in the juxtapositions of architectural forms also comes across in Universalist Church, as does his fascination with a kind of anonymous history, characterized here by cloudy windows that block the viewer's gaze. Hopper's pictures overwhelmingly suggest evidence of life--work, play, worship--without making that life visible, Wilmerding notes. "So I find it interesting," he says, "in how much this painting tells us about Hopper and his personality." Gesturing to the tower, he continues, "This kind of recurring motif seems so deeply about himself, almost as a kind of isolated American."

Isolation, loneliness, and estrangement also characterize Maine Woods (1944), a darkly strange watercolor by Andrew Wyeth. "At first this looks like a kind of a mess of a drawing," says Wilmerding. "On the other hand, there is this fascination with the deep woods. Talk about the survival of the Ruskinian tradition! It's interesting--the precise, broken old tree trunk here in the foreground, and this ultimate sense of a kind of mystery, moving beyond the observed world into something that's almost psychological."

The haunting or dreamlike quality that distinguishes the Wyeth continues in a neighboring drawing, Woman in Bed With Sheets (1978), by Sidney Goodman. "This is a fairly recent gift by, to my mind, Philadelphia's great contemporary artist in the Eakins tradition," Wilmerding asserts. Demonstrating what Wilmerding calls "one of the varieties of modern American realism," Goodman's drawing is striking for its strange, aerial point of view, unsettling voyeurism, and enigmatic eroticism.
As in many of his works, there is also something of the erotic in Tom Wesselmann's Study for Still Life, No. 22 (1962). It is hard to ignore the prominence of the phallic, oversized orange soda bottle in the middle ground of the work, particularly as the unadulterated, Edenic produce of the foreground appears to stand in direct opposition to it--as a band of round, breastlike, female tempters. "This was--it's hard to believe now--an extremely controversial acquisition in 1971, at the end of the Pop decade," says Wilmerding. "There was a lot of resistance by the committee, because, of course, Pop art was so offensive and seemed so frivolous ... ." "But now it's almost classical," finishes Giles.
"West to Wesselmann" celebrates the art museum's publication of American Art in the Princeton University Art Museum, Volume I: Drawings and Watercolors. The 385-page, fully illustrated catalogue features essays by John Wilmerding and Kathleen A. Foster, as well as individual entries on the 77 works included in the exhibition, and a checklist of the Princeton University Art Museum's full collection of American drawings, watercolors, and sketchbooks. For more information on the exhibition, visit www.princetonartmuseum.org.