Watercolors: Visions from the Greenhouse

Tacked on the wall of a large converted greenhouse in the once exclusive socialite enclave of Tuxedo Park, north of New York City, is an 8th century Chinese poem:

/ would not paint a face, a rock, nor

brooks, nor trees

Mere semblances of things, but

something more than these.

That art is best which to the soul’s

range gives no bound,

Something besides the form,

something beyond the sound.

The poem is the credo of Albert Christ-Janer; the greenhouse is the studio where he grows his watercolor studies of something more than nature (see opposite page).

“My pictures are really abstractions,” says Christ-Janer, 55, “that, I hope, come through with a magic that makes people see nature in them.” He can brush a cool, grainy vision that recalls arctic tundra seen from 25,000 ft. up, or the scorched, forever autumnal desert of the American Southwest. Says he: “The earth, the sky and the sea are my sources of information.”

As dean of Brooklyn’s topnotch Pratt Institute Art School, Christ-Janer has precious little time to be in contact with his prime sources. He picks up many of his impressions while flying around the lecture circuit or to Europe, works them out only on weekends. A scholar as well, he has taught in seven colleges since graduating with an M.A. from Yale, written four books, including biographies of the artists George Caleb Bingham, Boardman Robinson and Finnish-born Architect Eliel Saarinen, under whom he worked at Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy.

Since watercolor is a quick medium, it appealed to him from the start because it fitted into his crowded sched ule. He also found that he could not tolerate the smell of turpentine nor the messiness of oils. Though watercolors lack the warmth of thicker media, Christ-Janer strives to enrich them. In pursuit of textural effects, he has experimented with polymer glues to bind his colors, sand or gravel sprinkled on to give them tactility and visual variety.

The results, which go on display this week in a one-man show at the Brooklyn Museum, are Oriental in their subtlety, suggestive of the seasons, as oblique as they are abstract. “I am not interested in specific nature,” says Christ-Janer, “but in the feeling toward it. I have no message, belong to no schools or groups.” His art invites contemplation, not as naturalistically as the 19th century Japanese master Hokusai, depicting the “floating world” in his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, but with the same aerial delicacy that defies the banalities of time.