OLLECTIBLE "":'0 t ,,:, . ':i" X"" : "'" .:; ., - \: '::' .' 'I .t, :"l' .:.,: 1"':: ,.::.., ",,:::'..,.,',. ,...., v 'I" .:,li . . t '\ ,.' t,. ,.::.,. >"":: ... Z< '#t t# *' , '" .",. I 't .:" 'foo; .ii,: '" .. A . , f ' t, '. "" \ 4 ..ø :::w <./), ".. ,. ,...... ,., """iY"..- ": ";-. " t <-, - ; .t .. /if 4- " . .;;0 "*' ". >1< --- /S $ N \ if # 'b :: \ ! , f :' 1 " "ff. ..: vi '0/ <"-: ..,.. ..tJf. -:':..,: ;,...' < $.; -".,., ..:IS *-.w *"*" 'Iò .. ",." ;; ""\, , "" \.\: "- ^ -, y / # .$, .. } 'fI""# 'Ì'" -w .,.,."" 'f: ,. A poster by Susan Powers in blue, green, white, gray and brown, 24 x 32 inches Unframed at $17 50 and framed at $75 ppd poster originals, ltd. 924 Madison Avenue New York NY 10021 158 Spring Street New York NY 10012 To order, call (212) 861-0422 Send $7.50 ppd. for complete 120 page catalogue r 1 " C ollectibles" is a special monthly advertising section designed exclusively for art galleries and antiques dealers. For more information about thtS special advertising opportunity call your sales representative or Tamarah Haigh at THE NEW YORKER, 212-840-3800 L J OCTOBER. 6, 1986 mastering a full range of British wa- tercolor techniques. His Cullercoats watercolors are notable for theIr large size, their technical virtuosity, and their focus on the buxom local fisherwomen, presented as symbols of proud fortitude. He never painted in that academic style after he came home. In 1884, he settled permanently in Prout's Neck, Maine, and pro- ceeded to let his eccentric Yankee tal- ent take its own course. Homer's oils did not keep pace with his watercolors. The famous set pieces -"The Life Line" (1884), "Under- tow" (1886), even "The Gulf Stream" (1889)-look static today, moored firmly to their narrative buoys. Some of the watercolors could have been painted last week. It is not just their freshness (the result of Homer's dazzling technique) that makes them look so contemporary. It has to do, I think, with the essentially modernist need to "make it new," an attitude that would soon become endemic among the more advanced artists in Europe. American artists were not the only ones who felt they had to break with five hundred years of European painting. "I want to be as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe," Paul Klee wrote in 1902. The irony was that most Amer- ican artists, living in a country that considered itself the new world, lacked the confidence to reject the European past. Modernism was born and raised in Paris, Munich, and Moscow. Very few Americans even realized what Homer was doing in his post-1884 watercolors, or where his miraculously controlled infatuation with color was leading. In his sun-drenched images of the Bahamas, done in the mid-eighteen- eighties and late nineties, radical crop- ping deletes all but the most essential details. The water in these pictures is a tangible presence, laid in with sure strokes of a fully loaded brush, indigo and turquoise and aquamarine sliding into one another but each hue retain- ing its own clarity in the eye. They appear to be loosely painted, but they are not. Every stroke, every accident becomes part of the intricately orches- trated dance of color. His painting had ceased to be an imitation of external reality. Coloristic landscapes such as "Woods at Prout's Neck" and "Among the Vegetables" (both dated 1887) rival in their chromatic freedom the most delirious achievements of Im- pressionism, which was then only just starting to be accepted in America.