WATERCOLOURS: TATE BRITAIN

WATERCOLOURS: TATE BRITAIN 

 Watercolours are usually accorded the status of a conservative medium as opposed to oils that achieve permanence and magnificent tones and lustre. Watercolours are known for their portability, immediacy, durability. 

 Watercolour is a kind of early pre-camera, extending the possiblities of paint into fulfilling cartographic functions as well as depictions of terrain and fortifications. Their usage for military purposes from the late Medieval period onwards is documented in this exhibition as is their use by naturalists. Naturalists also found watercolours a convenient medium for use in the field, abroad in inhospitable or difficult terrain for pragmatic, functional purposes but they could also be quintessentially painterly in their expressive usages beyond simply mapping terrain or depicting an orchid. Watercolours also documents the use of the medium by war artists, paintings of soldiers (after Waterloo and World War 1) with grim wounds and also of battlefields intimates the range of usages beyond the merely aesthetic. Watercolours is connected together by chronological and genre strands but also by the inter-connections found between individual artists and the appearance of alternate painting genres such as Orientalism. Richard Dadd somehow coalesces with Samuel Palmer. Incidentally paintings from earlier exhibitions such as Orientalism seem to appear as if part of a vast strategy of re-cycling of earlier exhibitions by the Tate Britain. Watercolours is at pains to say that watercolour is a serious art form finding some banal examples from the likes of Tracey Emin who has once again bullied her way into a major retrospective. There are samples from the work of Turner whose late watercolours are informed as much by his experiments in an early kind of impressionism as by his failing eyesight.

 My overall impression of Watercolours is that it could have been much fresher and invigorating and could have arrived at more interesting conclusions and posed better questions to the viewer. 

 Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, May 2011

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