THE PRIMACY & VERSATILITY OF DRAWING

Lecture chaired by Peter Rex Valentine

Deanna Petherbridge CBE

Arnolfini Professor of Drawing, University of the West of England

28th September 2004

A Young Woman Sleeping (Hendrickje Stoffels) c.1654

by Rembrandt van Rijn

Brush & brown wash © British Museum

‘Drawing is traditionally the generator of ideas and the means by which artists investigate and support artistic practice and structure the visual imagination’ was the introduction to this lecture. In order to approach such an enormous subject, and illustrate some of the functional and expressive range of drawing, the speaker concentrated on a single artist per century, beginning with the greatest master of the quattrocento, Leonardo da Vinci and ending with Picasso.

She explained the reasons for presenting such a wide historical span of drawings was to emphasize her belief ‘that the primal importance of drawing in all aspects of visual art and design remains as potent today, in the age of computer-aided design as it did in the early Renaissance, when the production of paper in the West coincided with the renewal of interest in representing the human body as the basis of representation.  What is more, the simplicity, directness, and economy of drawing and its ability to tackle very complex matters through the refining processes of sketches, makes it far less rooted in the period specifics of its time’.  Far more than painting, drawings, from even five centuries ago, are still approachable and accessible to contemporary viewers.

The first group of slides were used to illustrate notions of the Versatility of Drawing, ranging from very finished drawings to rough sketches, and encompassing a wide range of materials and techniques. This section opened with contrasting drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, the sketchiest of scribbled heads (from the Codex Trivulziano in Milan) to the large and heavily worked Burlington House Cartoon, The Virgin & Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist. A discussion of Leonardo’s pentimenti (that is, rough corrections and overdrawing to ‘first-thought’ sketches) introduced a discussion of finito and non-finito.  This traditional opposition is between open-ended drawing which requires imaginative completion from the viewer, and finished drawings such as cartoons and presentation drawings, which approach the status of a public art-work.  Contrasting drawings by Raphael (particularly his fine use of metal-point on prepared paper) Dürer and Rembrandt were discussed in relation to this concept, culminating in J-A-D Ingres’ complex Odalisque with Slave 1839 in which every inch of the paper is textured and worked over.  The section ended with a discussion of Vincent Van Gogh’s Street at Saintes Maries 1888, where the amazing variety of mark-making was interpreted as a code for the types of brushmarks and colours which Van Gogh employed in his painting.

In the section of the talk Drawing as a Tool of Investigation, the speaker concentrated on the uses of drawing for investigating the natural and scientific world, as in Leonardo’s landscape drawings and those by his contemporary Fra Bartolommeo, or the wonderful naturalism of Dürer’s plant and animal studies.  Leonardo’s anatomical studies were discussed at some length, in the light of his invention of sophisticated drawing codes such as transparent sections, exploded views and ‘string’ diagrams for representing complex myological and skeletal systems. The constructional aspects of drawing in the service of perspective were examined in relation to Dürer’s analytical studies in proportion.

Issues relating to The Expressive Line, that is, the ability of drawing to express both the emotion of the subject-matter and that of the drawer/artist, were examined through the drawings of Rembrandt and Goya.  Rembrandt’s drawings, including the famous A Young Woman Sleeping in the British Museum (illus: A Young Woman Sleeping (Hendrickje Stoffels) c.1654 by Rembrandt van Rijn © British Museum) employ a seemingly effortless economy of strokes, not unlike the courtly notion of sprezzatura  (nonchalant skill) defined by Castiglione in the 16th century. Rembrandt’s reed pen and brush reveal the pressure not only of hand and arm, but the whole body of the artist, in what can be defined as phenomenological drawing.  Goya’s drawings, expressive of a wide range of materials, mark-making and emotive subject-matter were generally preparations for his prints. A drawing from the Images of Spain Album was analysed for the drama of its simple composition, with lunatics emerging from a dark prison into light, and They’re Very much in Harmony from The Black Border Album discussed as revealing a pre-occuption with the sense of hearing and touch. This tactility reaches its apogee in Goya’s late Bordeaux drawings, probably done in greasy lithographic crayon, where the almost blind artist ‘felt’ his way across the page.

By contrast with expressive drawing, the lecture ended with a group of cool neo-classical drawings from John Flaxman to Picasso, where unshaded, simple outline drawing, of the sort used in textbooks as well as comics, reveals information of a coded nature with great clarity.

Deanna Petherbridge

Discussion

It was pointed out to the speaker that she had failed to deal with measured working drawings, for which she apologised, reminding the audience that her presentation was anything but comprehensive. The main debate was centred around issues of computer drawing, with strong views from the audience that the technology was detrimental to expression, although the speaker stressed that new technologies, which have positive as well as negative effects, need time to become embedded in culture. A member of the audience commented on the importance of the computer revolution in music.