EXHIBITION OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY DRAWINGS
FROM A CELEBRATED PRIVATE COLLECTION TO BE EXHIBITED AT THE SACKLER
For Immediate Release: December 1, 1997 - The special exhibition "Drawing is another kind of language": Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection will be on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum from December 12, 1997 through February 22, 1998. Nearly one hundred drawings by modern and contemporary artists will be on display in this exhibition-the first presentation of a collection widely considered to be among the most important of its kind in the United States. Among the artists represented will be Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Eva Hesse, David Jeffrey, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Carole Seborovski, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Sara Sosnowy and Richard Tuttle. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. "Drawing is another kind of language" is organized at the Harvard University Art Museums by James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot director, and Harry Cooper, the Fogg Art Museum's associate curator of modern art. The Sackler Museum is located at 485 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"We are honored to have been given the responsibility of organizing this exhibition," noted James Cuno. "It represents just a few highlights of one of the best and most important collections of its kind anywhere in the world. That the collector entrusted us with this exhibition is a sign of his high regard for our teaching mission and work with students of all ages, both within the University and among the larger general public of greater Boston."
Each of the drawings included in this exhibition probes two basic material facts of drawing, the mark and the surface. At the same time, each one animates those facts with a strong impulse, a distinctive touch. Although it may be without gesture, and sometimes even without line, each artist makes his or her own mark.
Gesture is the traditional hallmark of drawing, the handwriting that guarantees the intimacy of the aesthetic encounter. In the late 1940s, artists like Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline brought that tradition to a peak, making their art from personal, even heroic marks. In reaction, other artists like Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt sought to keep the evidence of the artist's hand and wrist to a minimum, while still insisting that drawing was central to their art. It is their alternative spirit which inspires the collection presented in the exhibition.
"Drawing is another kind of language" will include the work of minimalists and post-minimalists, conceptual and installation artists, painters and sculptors and draftsmen. What seems to unite them is the question: How to replace gesture in the language of drawing? As the visitors to the exhibition will see, a variety of answers are posed. Some artists replace gesture with unusual procedures. In his Location series, Sol LeWitt (b. 1928), methodically pursued the crazy idea of making drawings that included their own written instructions. This is seen in his drawing entitled The Location of Geometric Figures: A Blue Square, Red Circle, Yellow Triangle and Black Parallelogram (1976).
Other artists in the exhibition interrupt the flow of drawing by using masking tape, collage, and unusual drawing tools. In her diary, Eva Hesse (1936-1970) described the making of Untitled (Vertical Abstraction) (1960) with a "crudely shaped wrong side of a small brush." In his Untitled (Mirror) (1952), Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) used oil, solvent transfer, watercolor, crayon, pencil and collage. Using the solvent, he rubbed magazine and newspaper images onto paper, reversing them in the process.
Many artists in the exhibition turn to the grid, that master figure of modernism, but subvert its controlling precision. In Carol Seborovski's (b. 1960) Underlying Lines (1991), a grid underpins more freely applied media. Placed on top, collaged strips attempt to contain the layers of mixed graphite and pastel thriving below. Elena del Rivero's (b. 1952) Letter to Mother (1995), made with thread and typing on paper, is one of 300 cryptic letters that switch the gender of Franz Kafka's "Letter to Father". Cross-stitching evokes overtyped letters; her sewn grid upbraids the minimalist penchant for macho materials.
The sculptors in the exhibition, such as Richard Serra (b. 1939), tend to take drawing into the laboratory of the drafting table or else up to the Olympian heights of sculptural equivalency. When Serra says "drawing is another kind of language," the emphasis is on another. For Serra, drawing is a language of doing and making. This explains why his sculptures are rarely preceded by drawings. That would make the drawing a projection, a mental object. Rather, most of his drawings, he says, "are the result of trying to assess and define what surprises me in a sculpture." One of Serra's drawings to be exhibited, Forged Rounds I (1993), was made following the installation of Two Forged Rounds for Buster Keaton (1991), a sculpture consisting of two fat steel cylinders about five and a half feet tall. In the drawing, Serra focuses on the edge and shape of a cylinder, evoking the distortions produced by walking around it, which he calls "peripatetic vision." The largest drawings in the exhibition, The Truce (1991) and Sinker (1992-93), are also Serra's. To produce these massive drawings, Serra heats commercial sticks of oil paint and compresses them into bricks, then draws with both hands and full-body movements. He achieves a wide variety of textures with the bricks, which may be harder or softer, wetter or drier.
The paintings of Jasper Johns (b. 1930), like the sculptures of Serra, are also rarely preceded by drawings. Johns prefers to draw from or after his paintings, engaging in pragmatic reuse or skeptical revision. He explains, "A finished painting usually seems to have a clear image, and using it as a subject of drawings may be a form of economics, a way of dealing with the absence of a larger idea. Or one might say that is a way of bypassing ideas in order to concentrate on the activity of making." Johns's 1956 drawing Tango refers to a painting of the same name from 1955. In the painting, a protruding key connected to a real music box draws the viewer close to its brushy blue surface. The drawing's tangle of lines achieves the same result.
Younger artists in the exhibition turn drawing on its head, rejecting the old hierarchy of mark and surface to take their inspiration from the paper itself. David Jeffrey (b. 1956) pushes the modernist focus on materials to the breaking point in his Untitled (1995), made with wax, charcoal and rust. His intensive marking, folding, and tearing produces effects of decorative patterning and organic decay-taboos of modernist abstraction.
"Drawing is another kind of language" will travel to Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunst-Museum Ahlen, Germany; the Berlin Akademie der Künste; and the Fonds régional d'art contemporain in Amiens, France; before returning to this country and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York. The exhibition catalogue contains essays by Dieter Schwarz, director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur and a specialist in contemporary American art, and by Christian Schneegass, professor of art at the Berlin Akademie der Künste, with extensive catalogue entries by Pamela Lee, assistant professor of modern art at Stanford University, and Christine Mehring, a Ph.D. candidate in modern art at Harvard University. (ISBN 0-916724-96-4, 125 illustrations/107 full-page color, 9 5/8 x 11 1/2 inches; $40 softcover).
"Drawings is another kind of language": Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection and the accompanying catalogue were funded, in part, by grants from Christie's, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Fifth Floor Foundation.
Panel Discussion, Lecture, Reception
Friday, December 12, Arthur M. Sackler Museum lecture hall, free admission
4:00 p.m. Panel Discussion
"Drawing is another kind of language": Contemporary Drawing
Today
Moderated by James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director,
featuring artists David Lasry, Ann Ledy, Brice Marden, and Joel Shapiro,
whose work appears in the exhibition.
6:00 p.m. Lecture
"Not a Drawing": Some Thoughts about Recent Drawing
Lecture by Dieter Schwarz, director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.
A reception in the Sackler lobby will follow. The exhibition will be open
for viewing. Complimentary parking will be available at the Broadway Garage
on the corner of Felton Street and Broadway.
Exhibition Gallery Talks
All gallery talks are free with the price of admission to the Art Museums.
Admission is free on Saturday mornings. Hearing assists are available
for gallery talks. Arrangements should be made beforehand by calling Visitor
Services at (617) 495-8286. To request a sign language interpreter, the
public should call (617) 495-2397 using the Massachusetts Telephone Relay
Service at 1 (800) 439-2370 (to transmit or receive TTY messages), three
weeks in advance of the gallery talk.
Saturday, December 20, 11:30 a.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Graham Bader, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Fine Arts.
Sunday, January 11, 2:00 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Edward Saywell, John S. Newberry Research Assistant, Department of
Drawings.
Editors please note title change for Edward Saywell
Saturday, January 17, 11:30 a.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Matthew Sims, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Fine Arts.
Saturday, January 24, 11:30 a.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Christine Mehring, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Fine Arts.
Sunday, January 25, 2:00 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Matthew Sims, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Fine Arts.
Sunday, February 8, 2:00 p.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Edward Saywell, John S. Newberry Research Assistant, Department of
Drawings.
Editors please note title change for Edward Saywell
Saturday, February 21, 11:30 a.m., Arthur M. Sackler Museum
with Christine Mehring, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Fine Arts.
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The Harvard University Art Museums' facilities are wheelchair accessible. For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. For press information or photographs, please contact Kate McShea Ewen at (617) 495-2397. For more information on events, please contact the Friends, Fellows, and Special Programs Office at (617) 495-4544. World Wide Web: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu.
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The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and on Saturday mornings. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June. The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m.
The Harvard University Art Museums is funded in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.