Connoisseurship Redux: Drawings for the Post-Modern Age

The time seemed right for such an enterprise. There has been a surge of drawing exhibitions recently, which have encompassed both the venerated “Old Masters” (Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, 2003, being the most prominent); and the hierarchy-busting work of younger artists, both in this country (Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, at the Museum of Modern Art, 2002) and abroad (What is Drawing? 2003, at the Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon, England). We wanted to reconsider historical drawings afresh: were there ways in which drawing meant that could be newly evaluated, or even discovered? Were there new revelations to be extracted from reconsidering technique and format, as James Harper had done in his catalogue, Verso: The Flip Side of Master Drawings (2001)?

At the Ashmolean, we were welcomed with exceptional generosity by Jon Whiteley, the Curator of Prints and Drawings. “Meeting” the drawings (which we handled gingerly with white cotton gloves) that we had gazed upon through the aid of imperfect slides or muddy xeroxes was a visceral experience. We were allowed an intimate relationship with the work of art not often available in an American museum, where drawing and print rooms sometimes have the character of a hushed, germ-free sanctum. Students were primed to take nothing for granted, to regard everything—every mark, discoloration, and shift of medium—as potentially revelatory. And the more they looked, talked with each other, and with Jon Whiteley, put the drawings aside, and looked again, the more they saw, and the more deeply they thought about how to structure the fields of knowledge and perception that drawings encompass. We all expected that drawing was full of personal expression; we were less prepared for the recognition that every choice of medium and technique can be as fraught with ideology as a monumental painting.

There are so many reasons to make a drawing, aside from preparing for a painting: to illustrate a lecture (Ruskin’s Lion’s Profile from Life), to conjure the ideal wife (Overbeck’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife); to intensify the remembered character of a place (L’Hermitte’s View of Pont-en-Royan); to exhort children to be virtuous (Arthur Hughes’ Sweep the Floor); to thank a patron for an expensive trip (Louis Dupré’s An Armenian, Standing). During our time at the Ashmolean, through the process of repeated looking and discussion, conventional boundaries—of medium, geography, subject matter, and of the importance of hierarchies—began to dissolve, inspiring more flexible structures for understanding the representation of the self in the world. We tried to understand the “friendship portraits” of the German Nazarene school; a French landscape that resembled a deserted ruin-in-the-making; a fashionable woman who seemed almost imprisoned by the riot of pattern and color that was her costume; the almost deviant facial asymmetries in Léon Bakst’s Portrait of Virginia Zucchi. We often wondered about the identity of a subject (such as the grave young woman who gazed out from Franz Horny’s extraordinary Portrait of a Girl), and her relation to the artist (as in Alexander Bryulov’s Portrait of Marie-Amélie, Queen of the French). Sometimes, when research failed, we wondered about the life and career of the artist—for example, we still know very little about Francesco Priolo. —And finally, we learned that drawings reveal much more to the eye in person than any reproduction makes possible; paper fades, colors bloom or recede in reproduction, pigments change (the deep black areas in Renoir’s watercolor, Woman Seated by a Lake, are the result of the oxidization of the original, white lead pigment). Different kinds of connections were developed as we looked and talked, across media, countries and cultures, art and science, and across the academic and the avant-garde. A drawing has the reputation of being a variation of the “authentic.” Yet drawings make—not just represent—a world as fully and richly imagined as any painting.

I want to end by thanking the people who were essential to both the course and the exhibition. I thank first the students, who worked energetically, creatively, and generously to produce professional results: Rochelle Behrens, Sara Brady, Alison Chang, Melissa Ho, Jeehyun Lee, Adina Loeb, Jessica Slaven, Pamela Stewart, Anny Su, Isabel Suchanek, Gregory Tentler, and Marissa Vigneault. Astrid Bowlby, a young Philadelphia artist, taught us about the possibilities and complexities of drawing on and off the wall. Susana Jacobson of Penn’s Graduate School of Design educated us about technique and material, an essential foundation for seeing, as well as interpreting. Rena Hoisington, the NEH Curatorial Fellow from the Drawings and Prints room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, presented us with the museum’s related nineteenth century holdings, along with a treasure-trove of wisdom about drawings, prints, and pastels. Martin Brown of Andorra Travel patiently arranged our trip to England, providing invaluable advice. David Brownlee, the chair of Penn’s History of Art Department, made sure we had the funds to support both the journey to the Ashmolean and the catalogue, along with the help of the Provost’s Office, the Arthur Ross Foundation, and a generous anonymous donor. Dilys Winegrad’s long-standing ties to Oxford inspired the exhibition in the first place. To Jon Whiteley I offer our deepest thanks. His generosity knew no bounds while we were in Oxford, and I’m afraid we took advantage of it quite shamelessly. I hope he is not discontented with the results.