Art: Glimpsing a Lost Atlantis

A show in New York City provides an elegant primer on drawing

The exhibition called “Reading Drawings” that is now on view at the Drawing Center in New York City is as elegant a teaching show as one might wish to see. Why study drawings at all?

Because they are often the clearest index to a painter’s intentions; finished or fragmentary, they are the deposit left by the process of image forming, the residue of the darlings and probings that constitute pictorial thought.

Through them we are made privy to the sight of Rubens inventing half a dozen variations on a given arm until the right one clicks; to that of Watteau, infatuated with the silky passage of red chalk over paper, building up his stock of memory images and usable prototypes for later consumption. Looking at drawings seems an even more private affair than studying paintings. Drawings never lie about skill.

They are merciless little witnesses, like children. They reveal whatever is obsessive, mutable, intimate and experimental in an artist’s work.

Painters have always collected other painters’ drawings, to give themselves access to the code of imaginations they admire. Yet the first museum show of Old Master drawings (let alone ones by living artists) seems to have happened only about 100 years ago, in Berlin in 1881. It is a sign of the times that, for all the didactic efforts museums have put into photography over the past decade, showing how to deduce the complex intentions of what was once thought the simple truth of a photographic instant, very little of the sort has been done for the older and far deeper art of drawing. For one thing, the prestige of real graphic discipline has inexorably sunk in the art schools. The idea that drawing is anything more than a preliminary step to painting—that a mark on paper could, in its own right, achieve a density, finish, intensity and even grandeur as full as one on canvas—has withered in the face of facile generalizations about “major” and “minor” statements.

But behind such problems there has been a worse one. A century ago, most educated people drew as a matter of course because it was the best way to remember what they saw. Great Aunt Lucinda with her watercolor set, earnestly dabbling in the shade of the Duomo, may have been a figure of mild fun; but she (multiplied by tens of thousands) was also the ground from which the tremendous graphic achievements of a Degas or a Matisse could rise. Such amateur experience added up to a general recognition that to draw, to reconstitute a motif as a code of lines and tonal patches, is to think, and that such thought forms the root of all visual literacy. A stroll in SoHo today, by contrast, will furnish any number of artists who can barely trace, let alone draw.

There and now, an exhibition like “Reading Drawings” is salutary. It shows a tiny edge of a lost Atlantis. However, it is not a “masterpieces of ” show. Everything in it comes as a loan from the immense collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and its purpose is not to ask, “How beautiful can a drawing be?” but rather, “How and why was a drawing made?” The show, in other words, is an invaluable primer of technique, system and use, and its curator—Susan Lambert, deputy keeper of prints, drawings and photographs, and paintings at the V. and A.—has done a fine job of explication.

The show sets forth three basic traditional uses of drawing: as discipline, as imagination and for utility. The first is epitomized by the study after the antique or the copy after an admired master; the second by preparatory sketches for compositions, motifs, figures; the third by purely descriptive or hypothetical studies for machines, furniture, stage sets or buildings. In practice, of course, these uses tip and flow into one another. Unlike photography, drawing can represent what does not exist. This has commended it to the most fantastical of minds, from Bosch to the surrealists, as well as to the most practical, like Verrocchio designing a monument or someone planning a model kitchen for the London gas board.

The representative specimens from the V. and A. range from an overcleaned Rembrandt (showing what can happen to the tonal qualities of ink on old rough paper after it has been washed and pressed to remove foxing) to some doodles and sketches by the British auto designer Alec Issigonis; from a sexy scribble of two reclining nudes in about five lines by Gustav Klimt to a cross section of James Paine’s design for Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, circa 1768, done with that strict, codified mastery of ink-and-wash rendering that is the envy and despair of every “postmodernist” architect today.

How did an artist of genius capitalize on the peculiar conditions of photomechanical reproduction in the 1890s? Aubrey Beardsley’s sharp, spikily articulate design for the frontispiece of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur tells us. Was the long-derided practice of drawing from plaster casts rather than the living model really as deadening as we were once told? Assuredly not, as anyone can tell from the almost terrifyingly obtrusive student drawing of a plaster foot by the future English academician, Sir Luke Fildes.

Why might drawing in metal point require more decision and confidence than drawing in lead pencil? Because the latter can be erased, the former not. What is the difference between chalk and pastel, sepia and bister, laid and wove paper, pouncing and squaring, vellum and parchment?

Such nuts and bolts are laid out with unfailing clarity: all the technical stuff one thinks one knows but is hazy about is there. It is reported that 20% of Americans are illiterate, and 45% say they never read books; so it is not too dyspeptic a guess that 99% cannot read a drawing. If this show—which goes to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in August and the Worcester Art Museum in December—lops a tenth of a point off that score, it will have surpassed itself.

—By Robert Hughes