By Alexandra Pecci
Correspondent

The new exhibition, “From Homer to Hopper: American Watercolor Masterworks from the Currier Museum of Art,” opens next week at Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art.

“One of the great treasures of the Currier collection is its holdings of American watercolors,” says museum Director Susan Strickler, who also is curator of the exhibition featuring more than 75 paintings from artists like Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth and Georgia O’Keefe.

“Andrew Wyeth had his first museum exhibition at the Currier when he was 21 years old in 1939,” Strickler says.
The current exhibition includes one of the watercolors from that show. And it’s an exhibition that can be enjoyed on many levels, Strickler says.

To that end, those at the museum are encouraging visitors to examine the technique behind the paintings.

“You can really lose yourself in a watercolor,” she says. “There’s something about a watercolor where you can appreciate so much more the actual touch or hand of the artist.”

Visitors to the Currier’s exhibition can see this for themselves in Winslow Homer’s 1883 painting “Fishwives,” which depicts women looking out to sea at a schooner that’s floundering in a storm.

“These women are really statuesque. They are almost heroic in the way he portrays them,” Strickler says.

In addition to appreciating the painting’s narrative, visitors can look at the way Homer created a blustery sky using pools of watercolor washes; and how he scrapes or blots away the top layers of watercolor washes to articulate the folds of the women’s billowing skirts.

The museum also has included in the exhibition a few paintings in other media, so visitors can compare and contrast how the same artists painted with watercolor versus oil or egg tempera, for example.

“This is an opportunity for people to see the different artistic results an artist could achieve using different media,” Strickler says.

The exhibition shows four watercolors from Wyeth, as well an egg tempera painting.
Strickler encourages visitors to go through the watercolor exhibition, and then go into the museum’s American collection to find works by some of the same artists in a different media, challenging themselves to think about why an artist would choose to paint in watercolor.

The watercolors exhibition also marks the first time in the Currier’s 80-year history that the museum has provided an audio tour, via cell phone. Strickler, along with artist and Art Center Director Bruce McColl narrate the audio tour, so visitors can “get the perceptive of an art historian, as well as an artist.”

Whether visitors take the audio tour, a docent-led tour, or simply read the labels on the paintings themselves, Strickler says people should plan to spend at least an hour viewing the exhibition. There are also a number of activities and programs running in conjunction with the tour, including watercolor demonstrations, gallery talks, and an intergenerational discovery gallery.

Strickler hopes that visitors take much away from the exhibition.

“I hope they discover artists that they didn’t know; I hope they discover some insight into how watercolors are actually done and which artists actually use watercolor,” she says.

IF YOU GO:
What: “From Homer to Hopper: American Watercolor Masterworks from the Currier Museum of Art.” Also additional talks and programs.
Where: The Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester, N.H.
When: March 6 to June 7.
How: Free with museum admission, which is adults: $10, seniors $9, students: $8, and children under 18 free. call 603-669-6144 or visit www.currier.org.