Art: GREAT DRAWINGS

DRAWINGS are to paintings what letters are to public declarations, or diaries to autobiographies, or songs to symphonies. Michelangelo called drawing the basis of almost all knowledge, believing that only the outline, on paper or in mind, can make meanings clear. Master drawings merge swift emotion with analysis. They are both personal and sharp.

A loan exhibition at the Knoedler Art Galleries last week amounted to a miniature anthology of the best European drawing. Brought together to benefit Columbia University, and sponsored by President Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth (who sent Signorelli’s Hercules and Antaeus, and five other drawings from Windsor Castle), the show included 88 of the world’s greatest. No one living could be sure which among them had the greatest claim to immortality. But the Altdorfer, Watteau and Goya drawings on the next four pages (all reproduced exactly full scale) would certainly be strong candidates.

Altdorfer, leader of the “Danube School,” saw the world as a stage, but a stage of infinite beauty and variety. Head in the lap of the treacherous Delilah, his Samson sleeps in the foreground of a landscape that is as weird and as familiar as a dream. Behind a bare tree in the background hover the Philistines, ready to pounce upon the sheared ram of God. Watteau’s study of lovers in a park makes black, white and red stand for all the colors of the rainbow. In Watteau, love and laughter blend into one. To round the gallery corner to Goya’s Two Prisoners in Irons can be like taking a header off a cliff. Unlike the monster-painters, whose malformed “images of man” are the latest art fad (TIME, Sept. 7), Goya made the victims of inhumanity—in this case, obviously a chained father and son—touching by the simplicity of their unadorned humanity. Instead of titillating the mind with sadistic fantasies, Francisco Goya dizzies the heart with cruel fact.