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.