Drawings from Munich and London in New York (1st review)

The Morgan Library and the Frick Museum in New York are both featuring splendid drawing shows that range from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, and in a season in which only the Guggenheim's "Picasso Black and White" has drawn much attention, they're among the major attractions the East Coast is offering.

Both shows come from single sources. The Morgan's "Durer to de Kooning," the larger of the two, has 100 works from Munich's Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, which dates from the mid-18th century and is, happily, still growing. The Frick's "Mantegna to Matisse" displays 58 drawings from London's Courtauld Gallery, a major repository (although founded only in 1927).

The two exhibits complement each other in many ways. Both contain works by masters from Da Vinci and Michelangelo to Picasso and beyond, and both institutions offer a happy bonus: at the Morgan, a small show of 16th-Century Florentine drawings organized around an enigmatic painting by Rosso Fiorentino; and at the Frick, a splendid late Van Gogh, Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier), on loan from the Norton Simon Gallery in Los Angeles.

Illusion of spontaneity

The Morgan show, as you might expect, is heavier on German art, and the Courtauld on English. In both cases, however, the Western graphic tradition's clear dependence on Renaissance neoclassical models is evident. Only with Romanticism can we see the beginnings of an alternative sense of vision; even with that, however, the connection to the Renaissance is only modified, not discarded.

There is no greater immediacy in the arts than drawing. A complete sketch, even a work of art, can be completed within seconds. The sense of freshness this can convey— of responding to experience or imaginative prompting with a minimum of filter or reflection— is what is often most attractive in draughtsmanship.

Of course, the idea of pure spontaneity is an illusion; the ability to conjure up a visual world in a few quick strokes is an accomplishment of great sophistication, not to say genius. But for aficionados of the graphic arts, the economy and suggestiveness of unadorned line, while an abstraction of sensory reality, is at the same time one's closest approach to it. Life goes by fast; line is the only thing, apart from shutter and lens, that can catch it on the wing.

The uncertain artist

Drawings in the pre-photographic age often did in fact function as rapid notation, or, when preparatory to some more "finished" work such as a painting, as free motion and experiment. A sheet of sketches may show a figure who will be fixed in a single posture in a painting from various angles; we see the artist thinking his conception into being, as yet unsure which of various possibilities will serve the final image.

This contingency adds life, because in life the person before us is full of choice, and will hold no position very long. The sketch sheet is, in short, animated in a way that painting can't be, and sculpture still less. The painter's image gives us something to hold onto; but the draughtsman's hand reminds us that character and personality is actually a flow.

The relative blankness of a drawing sheet adds spatial indeterminacy to the indeterminacy of the figure. Even a well-worked Old Master drawing is mostly empty space, yet it's not incomplete for that. Painting, you might say, is tyrannized by color, and tyrannizes the viewer in turn by confronting him with a space completely covered in daubs.

He prays, she sews

Perhaps the most important innovation in modern painting isn't in moving away from the image toward abstraction but in incorporating blank canvas into the design— in short, bringing painting closer to the condition of drawing, and thereby sharing its freedom.

Two examples of how "incompleteness" can function in a finished drawing: From the Munich collection, Raphael's Saint Ambrose, and, from the Courtauld, Cézanne's Portrait of His Wife Sewing.

Raphael's Ambrose is seated, his head turned upward in devotion and his hands clasped in prayer. We see the saint in full ecclesiastical regalia, but not the chair or throne he sits on, which is indicated only by the curvature of his body. Similarly, we see none of the scene that would surround him in a painting, since the sheet is bare but for his figure.

Of course, there is no scene in the drawing, and nothing is omitted: The focus is entirely on Ambrose and his spiritual aspiration, and any other material particulars would only detract from it.

Domestic but miraculous

Similarly, we see Madame Cézanne in a lightly sketched domestic scene in which her hands are clearly in a posture of knitting, but where in place of the cloth and the sitter's lap there is simply a luminous white space. The effect succeeds because of the openness of the sketch work, which also lets in light instead of ordinary material density, and aids in converting the performance of a humble domestic routine into something suggestive of the sacred, even the miraculous.

From our point of view, what these two drawings have in common is what for us is now the sacred and the miraculous: the human personality. It is Madame Cézanne who is luminous for us, absorbed in her daily task, and also Ambrose, who impresses us no longer with the content of his piety but rather its intensity. And drawing, more than any other of the plastic arts, captures personality, because it is free to concentrate on it to the exclusion of all else.

The earliest Renaissance portraits are stiff with social convention; they convey less of personality than of status. Little by little, however, the face seeps into the mask; Ambrose isn't simply his devotion but also a concrete individual who haunts us.

Freudian before Freud

Sometimes, personality is embedded in allegory. In Michelangelo's elaborate The Dream (1533), a typically contorted nude male figure sits surrounded by various temptations, while a descending angel blows a trump in his ear— presumably a message of restraint and virtue. But the figure is poised atop an open box, inside of which lie grotesque theatrical masks. It's almost a Freudian representation, reminding us that personality is also a site of permanent conflict.

Four hundred years later, in the Freudian era itself, Max Beckmann's Mirror on an Easel, set in the artist's studio, makes a similar point with greater economy of means. Of all Beckmann's self-portraits, this may be the most riddling; the artist is present but represented only by his studio objects (also including a mask) and his workspace.

Beckmann suggests the paradox of personality: It's most revealed through being hidden.

Mysterious bodies

The candor of High Renaissance portraiture was almost immediately succeeded by that still most riddling of styles, Mannerism, with its elongated figures, mask-like features and empty eyes. Jacopo Pontormo, the master of the style, gives us what is for me the most riveting image of either show, the Two Standing Women— perhaps Mary and Elizabeth— who, with their veiled faces and bodies that lean toward each other almost to the point of merging, suggest the further complication of personality in relationship, a mystery that simultaneously attracts and excludes the viewer.

Of course, drawing deals with much more than the human figure— with anything it chooses to, in fact. An extraordinary self-portrait by Fra Bartolommeo at the Morgan is paired with an exquisite sketch of a townscape, and with the German artist Wolf Huber we are in the realm of pure landscape, from which the human presence is absent or at best inferred.

That Nature can be hostile or indifferent to human intention is the subtext of a striking view of a stormy sea by Brueghel the Elder, which focuses on the turbulent waves, with tossed ships in the background. We are on the verge of Baroque sensibility if not style here, but only with Romanticism does Nature appear alien to man, or man diminished in relation to it.

Romantic, or absurd?

The difference is between, say, Hubert Robert's elaborate 1760 scene of a large, partly overgrown garden with small human figures, and Caspar David Friedrich's nocturnal drawing of a solitary man crossing a massive stone bridge. Robert's figures, even amid a partly encroaching nature, appear in control of their environment; they are posed, not to say staged. Friedrich's hunched figure is alone, and this solitude becomes a theme running through German art of the 19th Century and beyond.

It culminates, at least for the Munich show, in A. R. Penck's 1968 watercolor, I and the Cosmos, in which a protoplasmic red figure is outlined against a black, star-bitten sky. Penck's figure is ironic, not to say absurd; but the Absurd is, in modern terms, the Romantic agony— and anxiety, even portrayed through the comic, can be sharpened to the point of tragedy.

Echoes of a scream

Of course, Penck derives here from Edvard Munch's The Scream, one of whose versions is now on display at the Museum of Modern Art. Munch, though, depicts a bloody sunset that seems to echo his figure's great shout; while Penck's figure is silent against a void from which he appears utterly displaced. That's what a couple of world wars— and the perspectives of modern astronomy— will do for you.

I'd like to tell you about many other things— of a superb Titian action scene; of a rapid sheet of ink sketches by Jacques Bellange for an Adoration of the Magi; of Watteau's grossly naked Satyr, a stark image among his usually elegant lords and ladies; of a sumptuous Seurat nude emerging from the skeins of his Conte crayon— but you get the idea. Here are two first-rate exhibitions from two of the world's great treasure cabinets. For lovers of the line, it doesn't get better than this.♦


To read another review of the Morgan show by Marilyn MacGregor, click here.