Collecting Strokes of Genius

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/arts/design/a-gathering-of-greats-in-a-trove-of-drawings-at-the-morgan.html

Version 0 of 1.

Item by luminous, brain-zapping item, “Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings From the Thaw Collection” at the Morgan Library & Museum has to be one of the paramount group drawing shows of the era. It is also a grand summing-up of a career, an art form and an institution’s holdings.

During the past 60 years, the New York art dealer Eugene V. Thaw and his wife, Clare Eddy Thaw, gradually amassed a phenomenal drawing collection, notable not just for visual charisma, but also for chronological breadth, running from the early Renaissance to the near present, with lingering stops en route.

In 1975, the couple promised the still-growing collection to the Morgan. Earlier this year, they formally gave it more than 400 items, as a gift outright, one that the museum is calling transformative. The present show, a celebration of proprietary welcome and thanks, coincides with Mr. Thaw’s 90th birthday. (Clare Thaw died, at 93, this past summer.)

The exhibition of some 150 choice items fills both of the Morgan’s large ground-floor galleries, which for the occasion have been divided into cabinet-size nooks sequenced roughly by date. Mr. Thaw started out selling new art (in the 1950s he had a gallery-bookstore in the Algonquin Hotel, where he gave the painter Joan Mitchell her first New York solo), and the bulk of his collection is in 18th- and 19th-century material, but some of the show’s most arresting images are from Renaissance Europe.

An undisputed centerpiece is “Three Standing Saints,” a 1455-60 sketch in brown ink on paper by Andrea Mantegna. A committed, even doctrinaire classicist, Mantegna learned to paint by studying antique marbles. Some of his figures have the crisp perfection of 3-D printed sculpture, and he is thought to have used artificially stiffened fabric as a model for draped clothing. (A 15th-century German drapery study in the exhibition, of a shaped white mantle with no visible wearer, suggests how this might have worked.)

The Thaw drawing, though, looks hands-on and in progress. The three saints don’t have distinguishable personalities. (They may, in fact, represent three variations on one saint.) But, with their dense networks of ink lines, they give living pillars of sanctity an organic softness. And they convey some sense of the experimental effort that lay behind the Mantegna effect of precision-tooled poise.

Other Renaissance drawings on view feel comparatively relaxed and personable. From the workshop of the 15th-century painter Pisanello comes a sheet with five drawn of heads of young boys, each with a distinctive coiffure, and each ready to be, basically, Photoshopped into a painting.

A Venetian-born 16th-century artist, Domenico Campagnola, who studied with Titian (and whose work is sometimes attributed to his teacher) has a very strange landscape drawing here, of a city reduced, as if by earthquake, to rubble. The drawing is one of a series he did on the Apocalypse. Whether this particular picture was a sketch for a print or was meant to stand on its own, we don’t know, but it’s a shock-and-awe startler for sure.

It’s also entirely fanciful, which was an alternative direction for drawing. The haircuts on the Pisanello boys — bowl-cuts, buzz-cuts, frohawks, fades — may well accurately document Northern Italian styles of the day. But more and more drawing was becoming a medium for inventing, or altering reality, rather than recording it.

In a 1650 ink and watercolor drawing, the Dutch painter Pieter Jansz. Saenredam depicted, with what would seem to be immaculate exactitude, the interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, a Protestant Reformed Church, in Haarlem. Yet images of the same interior by other artists of the time contradict some of Saenredam’s details. Did he, perhaps, leave out, or add, a chandelier or two in the interest of balancing his composition?

And sometimes even lifelike drawings reflect, not life, but other art. Three heartbreaking Rembrandt sketches, on a single sheet, of Christ lifted down from the cross, give every indication of having been worked out with live models. How else to explain the intimate, gawky tenderness with which the heads of the dead Christ and the man supporting him touch, almost in a kiss? Yet the image has easily locatable sources in older art, one being a 16th-century engraving of “The Deposition” by the Italian printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi, which was itself based on a painting by Raphael.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, drawing as a vehicle for fantasy took full flight, though sometimes weighted with political baggage. The great series of Punchinello drawings initiated by that gossamer-handed Venetian, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and vastly elaborated by his son Giovanni Domenico, was conceived as both a caprice and a social farce, one we can identify with today: a vision of a world run by venal clowns.

The Tiepolo family targeted their images to urbane collectors. Francisco de Goya, in Spain, kept his darkest drawings to himself while he day-jobbed as court artist to one Spanish king or another. Goya wasn’t a front-line revolutionary; he was a drawn-line revolutionary, generating images that became formally more compressed and philosophically more anarchic as he grew older. They’re graphic time bombs, still ticking.

The Thaws invested deeply in Goya — there are seven drawings on view — as they did in Rembrandt, and in the penumbral, still-underrated late-19th century isolate Odilon Redon. Technically or not, all these artists are Romantics. So are two beyond-superb landscapists, Samuel Palmer in England and Caspar David Friedrich in Germany. For them, Nature was the only realness and they went for that ultra-realness in their art.

In his “Pear Tree on a Walled Garden” from around 1829, Palmer dabs opaque watercolor on so thickly that the flower-laden tree appears to bloom right out from the paper’s surface. And to bring Nature to life, Friedrich, in his “Moonlit Landscape,” treated drawing as theater: He cut the moon out of the sheet, inserted a circle of pure white paper, and displayed the piece illuminated by a lamp from behind.

These people, who can come across as space cases, were seriously in love with the world, and shaped by that love. So was van Gogh, another Thaw favorite. There are several drawings in the collection, and four in the show, including an 1888 letter to Paul Gauguin in which van Gogh depicts, in words and a drawing, his own famous bedroom at Arles or maybe the painting he’s done of it.

I always take the image of that room — that orderly, uncluttered, sky-blue oasis of quiet — as a van Gogh self-portrait. The drawings in the show include many portraits. Some — Antoine Watteau’s fleet chalk image “Young Woman Wearing a Chemise,” Theodore Gericault’s “Head of a Black Man” – aren’t labeled as such. Others are.

Henri Fantin-Latour’s 1872 watercolor “Portrait of Arthur Rimbaud” is the real thing, a high-polish study made for a large group painting of Paris writers, now in the Musée d’Orsay. In that big picture, the teenage Rimbaud sits off to the side, blank-faced, sulking. “What am I doing with these guys?” In the drawing, he looks a bit happier, warmed by the solo spotlight.

If you know the back story, Pablo Picasso’s lovely ink and wash “Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter” is a sad document. It dates from 1936, when the artist was about to leave his young lover of nine years for another woman. How personally to take Jackson Pollock’s half-abstract, half-figurative “Untitled [Drawing for P.G.]” is another matter. Pollock sometimes composed such image-stews — this one has masks, beasts, gaping mouths — for scrutiny by his analyst, though he also used them to get his unconscious primed for painting, as was probably the case with this piece, which he dedicated to his New York art dealer, Peggy Guggenheim.

Mr. Thaw has played a vital role in the artist’s posthumous career as co-editor of the 1978 Pollock catalogue raisonné. The Morgan show — organized by Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of drawing and prints at the museum — is accompanied by a smaller but similar publication devoted to the Thaw drawings. As a summary statement, the book, like the show, is a form of punctuation, though, graphically speaking, which one: an exclamation point, a question mark, an ellipsis? All three.