This exhibition of drawings and sketches at the MIA seems to me to be pretty much ideal, more or less a perfect show. The works presented are mostly small and beautiful. They range across seven centuries and display an enormous range of styles: some of the sketches are raw, direct, immediate, scribbled with revisions and hastily executed; other pictures have been carefully finished, even polished with washes of watercolor or colored with oil paint. Almost all of the works will be unfamiliar to viewers -- indeed, many of the drawings, which are fragile and react adversely to sunlight, have not been seen for half a century. Accordingly, the spectator enjoys a sense of novelty and discovery studying the works in the show. Famous painters like Tiepolo and Carracci, Matisse, Picasso, and Degas are represented as are many artists completely unknown to me. The show has a reasonable proportion and human scale -- it is not painfully encyclopedic and you can look at each object closely and compare works all within the course of an hour to an hour and a half. Most importantly, these little images are lapidary, fascinating works that repay close attention. Too often, you emerge from an art show either exhausted at the scope of the display or irritated with monotony: many artists, even some of them great, are "one-trick ponies" who perfect a certain style or specialize in a particular subject matter and simply repeat themselves. By contrast, you leave this show refreshed and with your eye invigorated. This is an exhibition that you should attend and, if possible, on a week day or ninety minutes before the gallery is about to close when the show is not crowded. It's important to get as close as possible to these drawings, many of them smaller than the screen of the laptop computer on which you may be reading these words. (I wonder if people younger than me, habituated to watching movies on the cell-phones, aren't, perhaps, better suited to enjoy the pleasures of intricately wrought works presented on a very small scale.) Approaching these intimately scaled works very closely is important: you want to enjoy the gestural quality of the drawing, the artist's "hand" or ductus, the way that thickness of the line is varied for effect, the subtle use of white washes or highlights, even, the exquisite texture of the paper on which these drawings have been made. There's no substitute for seeing these things in person, up close, "taking a walk with a line" as a children's book that I loved 55 years ago called it. Even the catalogue, which reproduces the 100 works on paper in the show, is no substitute for close study of the pictures in person. As an example, consider a Milanese sheet of antiphons, a kind of late medieval hymnal, showing Jesus as the Salvator Mundi. The drawing, which is vivid and graceful, has been carefully tinted in bright color with small highlights of gold leaf. If you look carefully, you will see that the lozenges of gold leaf have been pricked to texture them -- the pin pricks on the patches of gold leaf are exactly spaced, each tiny indentation a couple millimeters from the adjacent mark in perfectly straight lines. These minuscule marks can't be seen in the catalogue, but are perfectly clear if you take off your glasses and push your nose to within six inches of the art work. The care and precision with which the gold leaf was pricked conveys an enormous amount of information about the sensibility of the monastic artist who made this gorgeous picture. And details like this are not visible unless you seek them out yourself: the pictures demand to be studied and, even more wonderful, they repay study, displaying tiny and brilliant effects that bring the viewer very close, indeed, to the moment of creation. Some the renaissance objects show a confidence of line and draftsmanship, an improvisatory beauty not seen until the 20th century in Picasso's fantastically self-assured drawing. There are agitated baroque sketches, mostly depictions of violence, made with an extraordinarily swift and calligraphic line. A Modigliani image on rough paper seems almost chiseled; it's sculptural. An early landscape by Mondrian is a haunting study of spidery trees, Dutch water, and a luminous sky. Winslow Homer's "Conch Divers" distills sun and sea into a powerful vignette. And, indeed, there are too many wonderful things in this show for me index them here.
Also on display at the Institute are some wonderful engravings by Cruikshank in the upstairs chamber devoted to graphic works -- the subject of the show is fashion and Cruikshank's satiric images of ridiculously wasp-waisted women and periwigged fat men in bulging waistcoats are funny and elegant at the same time. Two rooms of woodcuts and engravings on the subject of murder are intriguing -- lots of images of Judith and Holofernes or Jael driving a nail into Sisera's ear. A Cruikshank engraving of a woman throwing herself off a London bridge is an iconic image -- it has ghastly, near-surrealistic edge. On the main level, there is a show of tiny cameos, almost all of them images of a single human eye, painted on chips of ivory and, then, glazed. These images were sentimental forget-me-nots, memorializing love affairs in the early Victorian era and they remind us forcefully that the past was a "different country" indeed.
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