Art: Hard Lines

“Drawing,” French Painter Jean Ingres once remarked, “is the probity of art.” To many laymen, modern art as a whole lacks probity. But that does not mean the moderns can’t draw. The best of them, like the best artists of any century, draw almost as they please. The trouble is that few moderns care to please the puzzled layman. That point was driven home last week with an exhibition of drawings by 86 top-drawer moderns in the north Italian city of Bergamo.

The U.S. entries were among the hardest to decipher. John Marin’s seascape sketches and Karl Knaths’s penciled still lifes seemed little more than shorthand notes made for the artists’ convenience.

Some School-of-Paris giants were represented by studies which proved to the hilt their ability to echo the classical tradition that Ingres most admired. But gallery-goers paused longest before their less readable works, drawings which bore the stamp of each artist’s rebellious, individualistic style:

¶ Pablo Picasso’s pen & ink Nude Woman with Raised Arms was sketched in 1909, when the artist had already proved himself a master of academic drawing, and got bored with it. African carvings gave him a new departure: they substituted corners for classical curves and punch for prettiness. Picasso applied their principles to his Montmartre models, but he kept a respect for the realities of the human figure which the Africans never had. His Bergamo sketch was a tense, ebony-hard construction, half model and half idol. With such rough-cut works, Picasso had served notice that he preferred pioneering to perfecting his art.

¶ Georges Rouault’s Nude had been done with just a few swirls of a heavily loaded ink brush. Her head was heavy and rough as rock, her breasts were like sheep’s eyes, her puny thighs terminated in doughnut knees. But the picture’s very crudeness gave it drama. Backed into a dark corner, the body was startlingly white. At first glance the brush work might seem clumsy as a calligraph drawn in a Chinese kindergarten, but it made space of the flat paper, and crammed it with fat, interlocked sausages of light.

¶ Henri Matisse’s charcoal Seated Nude in a chair was a smudgy, uncertain study with none of Rouault’s power. The viewer could barely tell the flesh from the upholstery, and the girl looked as impersonal as a pillow. But all that had been part of the artist’s intention. By smudging out instead of neatly erasing his first hesitant strokes, he gave the picture a hot-off-the-easel look that it would otherwise have lacked. By sticking to foggy greys and muffling the girl’s personality in the armchair’s embrace, he reduced the drawing to what interested him: an arabesque of harmoniously looping and weaving lines.