Art: Thick & Thin

Like offhand remarks, artists’ sketches sometimes have a persisting value of their own. Last week both Chicago’s Art Institute and Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum featured big shows of drawings. Together they provided two backstage glimpses at Europe’s art history.

Manhattan’s Metropolitan featured 70 drawings from the 15th to the 19th Century. Standouts were six casual masterpieces by the 15th-Century Florentines, who drew mostly in sepia and silverpoint (indelible). Trained to make each stroke right the first time, men like Michelangelo, Filippino Lippi and Verrochio looked long and hard before translating their models’ flesh into thin lines. Their looser chalk studies, like Michelangelo’s Libyan Sibyl, showed the same supreme accuracy.

Rembrandt (1606-69), less interested in objective accuracy and less patient, enclosed the general looks of things with parenthetical stabs of his pen, gave them loose cloaks of broadly brushed shadow. His eight sketches at the Metropolitan (a woman hanging from a gibbet, a burgher sitting on a step, etc.) described not only what he saw but what he felt about it.

The Met was proudest of seven newly acquired studies by the 19th-Century Frenchman Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who believed that drawing is seven-eighths of art. His penciled portraits had all the icy perfection, but not the controlled fire of the Renaissance greats. Said Classicist Ingres: “Let us not admire Rembrandt and the others through thick and thin; let us not compare them. . . to the divine Raphael and the Italian School; that would be blaspheming.”

Chicago’s show, “Drawings Old and New,” would have been even more blasphemous to the French perfectionist. On exhibition were a Van Gogh landscape made of a briar patch of angry, tangled pen strokes; a Picasso drawing of two nudes which looked like sacks of coal (and another which might have been a doodle by Raphael); Group of Draped Standing Figures (headless) by British Sculptor Henry Moore; a wildly sketched, toad-faced “Conqueror” hoisting a stein of beer, by Mexican José Clemente Orozco. But even Ingres might have been willing to admit the simplicity and tenderness of Sculptor Brancusi’s three huddled Infants.