Harvard’s Fogg Museum Comes Back to Life with a Glorious Watercolor Show

The best of its great American watercolors are on view, and the museum now gives free admission.

A few weeks ago, I was in Boston to visit a donor — I’m always raising money for a righteous cause — and had a free slot, so I went to the Fogg, the art museum at Harvard. I hadn’t been there since the Covid mass hysteria, hallucination, and hypnosis. The Fogg, on instructions from its masters at Harvard, stayed shut to the public as long as it possibly could, and longer than almost every art museum in the country.

I missed the Fogg. It’s a unique, enriching experience. I have visited a hundred times over the years and still find its collection staggering and always a treat. It’s one of the country’s great museums. Its collection of American watercolors is the world’s best. These are rarely exhibited because of light sensitivity, so as soon as I learned about Into the Light: American Watercolors, 1880–1990, I planned a good long time to see it. Winslow Homer’s Schooner at Sunset, from 1880, is reason enough go to Cambridge. It’s more than electrifying. It’s hot, raw lightning.

Into the Light is a survey show, so I didn’t expect brilliant, new insights, but it’s a Fogg project, so it’s smart and serious. The book’s very good. It encapsulates watercolor scholarship and explains watercolor technique. Both book and exhibition do something different, aside from displaying the very best. They create a continuum among American watercolors over more than a hundred years. Homer’s watercolors are to die for, but so is Sam Francis’s 1960 untitled watercolor that’s as blue as the bluest sea and as big.

Many of the best American artists glided back and forth from oil painting to watercolor. Sargent, Homer, Whistler, Hopper, La Farge, Marin, Frankenthaler, and Sol LeWitt mastered both media. Why are Americans unusually blessed to do so? Watercolor, first and foremost, is the art of spontaneity, the art of the instant. Pigment dilutes and saturates across the paper surface, so it works for the look of immediacy, effects that are fluid, and unpredictable moments. Americans are more tuned to fast-paced change than anyone, anywhere. We’re a country driven by change. We live for the moment.

As we in Vermont learned a couple of weeks ago, water goes where it wants. Our house is on a hill, and the land around it is well drained. We have two branches of the Battenkill River running through the bottom of our property. During Hurricane Irene, that land flooded. In 2023, it didn’t. The water from our mountains decided to go somewhere else, mostly to spots that were dry in past storms. The art on view, such as Homer’s Adirondack Lake, from 1892, or the Francis watercolor, or Marin’s Seascape, from 1914, make the most from water’s will to power. Through a hundred objects, all from the Fogg’s collection, we can see how delectable watercolor is but also how finicky.

The exhibition begins with Fidelia Bridges’s modest 1870s watercolor of daisies in a meadow. I was vaguely aware of Bridges but didn’t know much about her. It’s a lovely little picture. The American watercolor movement began in the 1870s, inspired by John Ruskin’s push to get artists out in the natural world to convey its beauties, many of which are simple and overlooked. American landscape and seascape painters were already comfortable with this, but watercolor, with its transparent washes, was better suited to the magic of changing light. Watercolor in America was, loosely, our version of Impressionism. The medium evolves, of course. Chronologically, one of the last things in the exhibition is Hannah Wilke’s 1990 self-portrait, not close to nature but still very beautiful.

Whistler, Sargent, and Homer watercolors are next. The curators pulled the best things from the vault but also the best surprises, such as Sargent’s portrait sketch of Virginie Gautreau, the American, Paris-based socialite made famous by Sargent’s Madame X. Sargent made many drawings of his subject before tackling a full-length oil painting.

The Fogg sketch started as a pencil drawing to which Sargent added watercolor. I’d never seen it before. Gautreau has a recognizable profile but was best known for her unnaturally white skin accented by makeup tinted with violet, and rouge applied to her ears. Sargent uses black, gray, green, and blue watercolor to set her complexion off, but the watercolor washes animate her. She seems like a scary statue in the oil painting, now at the Met, or less a woman than a machine. In Sargent’s watercolor, she seems human.

Homer said he’d be best known as a watercolorist. I don’t know whether he believed this or not, but his watercolors made the medium respectable and, as works of art, they’re divine. Schooner at Sunset was a sensation when Homer first showed it for its rich color and abstract look. He painted a few sunset watercolors, which I call his Whistler moment. Whistler’s nocturnes are never this hot, but for luminosity, he and Homer are on parallel tracks.

Into the Light displays Schooner at Sunset and another Homer, Returning Fishing Boats, together. I don’t think Homer even painted a pure watercolor. He uses pencil, usually lots of it, for structure. Schooner at Sunset has a little graphite, but his fishing-boat picture has lots of pencil lines. For the first 20 years of his career, Homer was best known as the lead illustrator for Harper’s. Linearity never leaves his work.

The exhibition has a very good and useful display on watercolor technique. Harvard has one of the best art-conservation centers in the world. Its paper experts are very art-savvy but are also scientists. Harvard also owns the Forbes Pigment Collection of 2,700 color samples and Sargent’s watercolor brushes, scraper, and paint tubes. Watercolors are made from paint but also paper. A display on paper texture shows how artists used rougher paper to give objects dimension and depth.

Demuth, Prendergast, Marin, and Arthur Dove take us well into the 20th century. Demuth, we learn from mid-’20s watercolors of flowers and fruits, sprinkled salt in his watercolors to create lovely little halos around the crystals. Marin used his fingerprints as a motif. Most artists used white paper, which is more reflective, but for Fantastic Octopus, from 1942, Alfonso Ossorio used robin’s-egg-blue paper to give his blue and green colors more depth. Rothko became Rothko in the ’40s via watercolor. He was entranced by its drips and used them as a creative guide.

At points, Into the Light is an exhibition within an exhibition. Charles Burchfield’s career was almost entirely in watercolor, so a group of watercolors from the Fogg gives us a tutorial on his work. Agnes Martin and Joseph Stella are better known as linear artists, but their watercolors in the show are dreamy and ethereal. Sol LeWitt’s Wavy Brushstrokes, from 1995 is, at 16 feet across, a showstopper. It’s colorful, free-flowing, and the most sensual thing he’s done.

The genius of this exhibition is not only in the art and the smart, economical interpretation. People with different interests, tastes, and priorities can find their own delights in it. Whether it’s technique, concepts, revelation, or beauty, you’ll find it. After seeing that dumb, preachy, bigoted installation of American art at the Toledo Museum of Art, it was a joy and a salve to see Into the Light.

Harvard calls its art collection the Harvard Art Museums, and, technically, there are three. The Fogg came first, opening in 1895 and focusing on European art, mostly through plaster casts and photographs. The Busch-Reisinger Museum, established in 1903, collects and displays art from German-speaking countries.

The Sackler opened in 1977, dedicated to Asian art. Together, the three museums own about 250,000 works of art, an amazing statistic given the Fogg’s start not too long ago with plaster casts.

After much Sturm und Drang, Harvard consolidated the three museums at the Fogg, renovated and expanded by Renzo Piano at an immense cost. I’ve always called the museums “the Fogg” since it’s easier, the collecting boundaries of the three were never precise, and the acronym for the Harvard Art Museums — HAM — is, well, odd.

The big news, and kudos to the Fogg and to Harvard, is the Fogg’s announcement in late June that it’s going free, effective immediately. I was astonished, given my belief, now qualified if not shattered, that Harvard couldn’t give a hoot about the public. The admission fee was $20, with a miserly $2 discount for senior citizens and, here and there, a free night. That’s a lot of money.

College and university museums should be free, but many aren’t. They usually occupy prime real estate in their communities. Williams and Yale, where I went to school, own a big chunk of Williamstown, Mass., and New Haven. Colleges and universities don’t pay taxes. Often, their museums are the only thing to which the locals have access. I was the director of a museum, the Addison Gallery, that belongs to a private high school. The Addison has always been free, but it took an ardent, concerted sales pitch to get some of the townies to see it as theirs.

Good for Harvard for seeing this. The Estate of David Rockefeller made a big gift to the Fogg to make this happen, supplemented by money from the Harvard president’s discretionary fund. This is good citizenship. Since the Fogg’s a local, regional, and national treasure, this is good for the cause of art as well. I hear the museum’s visitorship is soaring. Free at last, thank heavens, the Fogg’s free at last.