“On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century”
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd St., Manhattan.
Published in The Record, Nov. 21, 2010
You sometimes hear it said that drawing is on its way to being a lost art. Can that be true?
It is, if what you mean by drawing is the ability to gracefully and incisively translate three–dimensional reality into a two-dimensional image, if what you mean is the discipline that Rembrandt, Goya and Degas excelled at, that Van Gogh struggled so hard to master, that Leonardo daVinci said was the cornerstone of “learning how to see.”
That kind of skill is no longer the foundation of art school training. Young artists today are more likely to make their statements with photography, installation, performance, video, or even words, than with drawing.
And yet… it’s hard to let go of the idea that drawing matters. It seems so … fundamental.
With the exhibit, “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century,” the Museum of Modern Art makes the case that drawing didn’t die, it just got deconstructed. MoMA reaches back over a century of art and extracts the humble line – drawing’s basic element -- and gives it what is surely its first solo show.
The result is a mixed bag. Trying to make an abstraction stand on its own can be interesting, but, well, the poor line has a hard time sustaining that interest over the show’s more than 300 works. The title, “On Line,” alludes to today’s high-tech connectedness, but it actually comes from the title of a 1920 essay by abstract painter Vasily Kandinsky. Kandinsky was a tireless systematizer and his analysis of lines finds such properties as temperature, movement, force, angle, sound and even male or female attributes.
The show gets off to a strong start. It begins in the second decade of the 20th century with some of modernism’s founding fathers, such as that lord of the lines, Picasso, and a black-and-white painting that looks like an elegant parts diagram for a disassembled guitar. Futurist Umberto Boccioni stirs up a storm of whirling lines in a trio of drawings that captures the dynamism of train travel.
Kazimir Malevich, whose suprematist style reduced everything to lines, bars, and squares, is a natural here. The same is true of his disciple, El Lissitzky, whose “Proun Room” ( a reconstruction), adds a third dimension to suprematist compositions so that lines pop off the wall like rods or thin boards.
Paul Klee, who once said “a line is a dot that went for a walk,” brings some lightheartedness to the discussion with such fanciful linear creations as “The Twittering Machine,” and “Portrait of an Equilibrist.” The show could have used a little more Alexander Calder, whose adventures in wire sculpture brought lines to hilarious life, but who is confined here to a couple of sober pieces that suggest orbiting planets and moons.
After mid-century, the show is much less rewarding. Jackson Pollock’s drip lines are a nice addition to the survey of line, but there are too many films and videos from the ‘60s and ‘70s of people drawing lines in snow, sand or lakebeds, or doing Zen-like things with string, rope and tape.
Contemporary art is represented by several site-specific pieces, such as Zilvinas Kempinas’s “Double O”, in which two strands of magnetic tape float in the wind of an industrial fan. Another is Luis Camnitzer’s “Two Parallel Lines,” which sends two knee-high lines along the bottom of gallery walls, one made of written phrases about line and the other a string of found detritus, like ribbon, tubing, cord, wire and yellow crime-scene tape.
You come out of this show seeing lines everywhere. Its most valuable lesson is that lines are mostly a human invention. They are the creation of artists, mapmakers and geometricians. As painter Edouard Manet once said, “There are no lines in nature, only areas of color one against another.” He might have overlooked the spider’s web and other filaments, but, then again, you don’t see those things in pre-impressionist paintings.
“Picasso: Themes and Variations”
Museum of Modern Art
Sept. 6. Wednesday through Monday
By John Zeaman
Special to the Record
One of the myths of modern art is that it left no room for narrative. In the beginning, that might have been true. Early cubist paintings, for example, rarely go beyond very simple landscape and still life. There’s no cubist version of “Leda and the Swan” or “Sermon on the Mount.”
And so, many artists took literally the idea of modern art’s revolutionary progress. There was no going back to those old storytelling pictures!
What, then, to make of Picasso, the co-inventor of cubism and one of modernism’s gods? As can be seen in the recently opened print exhibit, “Picasso: Themes and Variations” at the Museum of Modern Art, Picasso was very much a storyteller. He once called printmaking his way of “writing fiction.”
And what a cast of characters: nymphs, satyrs, sculptors, models, ancient Greeks, Biblical characters, wives, lovers, bulls, matadors, picadors and the artist’s most compelling alter-ego, the monstrous, lusty and ultimately tragic Minotaur.
Picasso made some 2,400 prints over the course of his career. The Modern, which has the country’s most comprehensive collection of this work, has selected about 100 of them for this gem of an exhibit.
As it happens, the exhibit is off the second-floor atrium, where the 64-year-old performance artist Marina Abramovic sits motionless at a table, a symbol of anti-narrative if there ever was one. This is part of her much hyped retrospective, “The Artist is Present.” Abramovic sits hour after hour, in one-on-one staring contests with a steady stream of visitors.
It is a famine for the eyes.
You can catch it without breaking stride on your way into Picasso, where the opposite experience awaits you. The earliest print in this show, “The Frugal Repast,” done in 1904 when the artist was 23, is a precocious masterpiece. The predicament of this gaunt and dreary couple, casualties of “La Boheme,” can be read in the gestures of their elongated and skeletal hands.
Picasso usually had the assistance of a master printmaker or two who coached him in the techniques of etching, drypoint, linoleum cut, aquatint and lithography and also did the actual printing. The exhibit is mostly in black and white, but there are splashes of color, as in the delicately tinted head of photographer-poet, Dora Maar, Picasso’s lover for nine years. In the 1959 linoleum cut, “Picador,” the actors are rendered in blood-red against a bright sun-yellow ground.
Picasso liked printmaking’s ability to capture a work’s evolutionary states, which allowed him to stop at any point along the way and make a print from a partially completed plate. Typically, these states acquire more depth and detail as they progress, but in a 1945 series of lithographs called “Bull,” the opposite happens.
After doing a rich and realistic rendering of the bull, Picasso surprised – and dismayed -- the master lithographers by scraping the surface of the stone to erase – a no-no in the craft – what he had done. He then produced a series of progressively abstracted bulls using fewer and fewer lines. These went from segmented versions that look like butcher’s diagrams to the last, which is as simple as a wire sculpture.
The most unforgettable character in Picasso’s “fictions” was the Minotaur, the subject of about a dozen prints, here. In mythology, the Minotaur was the monstrous and ferocious offspring of a liaison between Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos of Crete, and a beautiful bull. Picasso’s Minotaur is more cosmopolitan, sometimes merrily raising a champagne glass, other times jumping into orgiastic piles – once with a four-legged female centaur.
You can spend fifteen minutes studying the complicated “Minotauromachy,” which merges the Minotaur myth with the bullfight, but the most poignant pictures are those in which the blinded, bellowing Minotaur is led along a beach by a little girl. The pictures seem to draw on the story of Oedipus, the self-mutilated, inadvertently incestuous king who was led by his daughter, Antigone, in his final days. But the little girl in Picasso’s picture looks like his young lover, Marie-Therese Walter.
As biography, it’s indecipherable. But the themes and contrasts – monster and child, suffering and kindness, darkness and light, doom and redemption – are as rich as those in any myth, fairytale or Greek tragedy.
It’s also a far cry from the formal purity of modernism.
