On the balcony outside the Schiff Gallery on the second floor of the Cincinnati Art Museum is an exhibition of 20 stellar selections of late 19th- and early 20th-century watercolors from the museum's permanent collection. Organized chronologically and painted by some of America's most noted watercolorists, American Watercolors: Whistler to Wyeth includes landscapes, seascapes and portraits in myriad styles.

        “Our collection of American watercolors is small, but it is very choice,” says Kristin Spangenberg the museum's curator of prints, drawings and photographs and organizer of the exhibition. “We haven't shown our Andrew Wyeth in almost two decades, and we haven't shown the Homers or Sargents as a group in more than a decade.”

IF YOU GO

What: American Watercolors: Whistler to Wyeth     When: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; 11 a.m.-9 p.m. on Wednesday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and noon-6 p.m. Sunday, through June 2.     Where: Cincinnati Art Museum, Eden Park     Admission: $5, $4 seniors/students; free on Saturday     Information: 721-2787     There's more: Family Fun Workshop: 2-4 p.m. March 3. Children ages 5 to 12 tour the paintings, listen to 19th-century music and make their own works of art. Reservations required.

        Ms. Spangenberg seized the balcony space for this jewel of an exhibition, when she learned the current photographic display, Positively Alive: The Photographs of Maureen France would be contained in the main gallery area.

        “I look for opportunities,” she says.

        Her next opportunity will come in 2003 with the opening of the museum's much-anticipated Cincinnati wing.

        “I am saving the Cincinnati artists for the opening,” she says of her decision to hold back paintings by Elizabeth Nourse and Robert Frederick Blum from Whistler to Wyeth. “I am going to do a big 100-piece show of Cincinnati watercolors and pastels in 2003. That's something to look forward to.”

Group geographically

        The show follows the curvilinear space of the balcony, so when you enter (unfortunately into the center of the show), you find the earlier works to the left continuing chronologically to the right.

        There is also, coincidently, a geographical designation, with American painters living in Europe grouped together, then those who found inspiration in the East, Southwest and finally the West.

        “For me it makes sense to see contemporary work with contemporary work,” Ms. Spangenberg says. “You can see what is going on in a particular period of time.

        “There's a bridge of the expatriots living in Europe and their discovery of their native landscape. For example, we have John Marin and Benrimo discovering the Southwest at the early part of the century, when it wasn't a place to go yet.”

        Mr. Marin, a first-generation member of American avant-garde painters of the early 20th century, was as well known for his broad-brush strokes and innovative techniques such as blotting, lifting and scraping, as he was for his love of the natural world. Both expressionistic and semi-abstract, he was an early proponent of Modernism. He met Alfred Stieglitz in Europe, and the avant-garde photographer became a big supporter, showing Mr. Marin's watercolors in his New York galleries for almost 40 years.

        His “Vicinity of Taos” (1929) was painted on the occasion of his first visit to this small town in northern New Mexico. When he visited Taos in '29, he became entranced with the dramatic landscape and intense light that he captures in this painting.

        In “Truck Mountain Series No. 4” (1949), one of four watercolors exhibited at Mr. Stieglitz's An American Place gallery, he counters bold pencil strokes with overlays of transparent washes in a Maine landscape tinged by the fury of an impending storm.

        In Thomas Benrimo's “Death of a Penitente” (1940) we see the impact Hispanic culture has on this New York transplant to Taos in his response to the Penitente movement's rituals, focusing on the stations of the cross. A surrealistic landscape that echoes the bleakness of the New Mexican desert figures prominently in the composition, as does the pale figure of a woman fleeing a shroud-covered, enshrined body over which a flame burns.

Art Academy teacher

        A recent museum acquisition “Boiler Synthesis” (1941) by Ralston Crawford, who taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1940-41, is an impressionist response to an industrial landscape — a prime example of what he is best known for.

        A painter, photographer and lithographer his work evolved from tight-focus, realistic renderings of bridges, factories and shipyards to geometric abstractions in bright colors of bullfighting, jazz and the Easter procession in Seville. Bold planes in deep reds and navys punctuated by the black-black of rivets and seams create a close-up, rhythmic look at industry.

        “We recently acquired a photograph of the same subject,” Ms. Spangenberg says. “We like to show an artist in depth, and we can do that with works on paper.”

        What this exhibition may lack in depth it makes up for in sheerpleasure.

        “Four Women in a Park” by Reginald Marsh is a charming snapshot of transparent washes and lines. Andrew Wyeth's “Back Pasture” defies description. The artist's characteristic mastery of light is there, as is a mix of wet and dry brush techniques in a simple rendering of pick axes propped against the decimated stump of a tree.

        In “Reclining Woman,” John Singer Sargent uses a wax crayon to delineate the pattern of a shawl in a dynamic composition of intimate beauty. And Winslow Homer's “Marine, The Wave” is a spontaneous study of the movement of the sea rendered in cobalt blue, gray and green.

        “We're fortunate to have some of the leading figures represented,” Ms. Spangenberg says. “And in more than one piece. My selection was limited, but I do feel you see some of the major figures in the history of American watercolor.”
       
       

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