The Drawing Center

Fleisher (Butcher), 1928, watercolor, reed pen, pen and ink on paper, 18 1/8 x 23 1/4 inches. Signed and dated lower left verso. Courtesy David Nolan Gallery.

George Grosz has been described as both a misanthrope and a utopian.[1] Paintings like Cafehaus (1915) or Drinnen und Draussen [Inside and Outside] (1926), with their slatternly floozies and inflated, cruel businessmen, are prime demonstrations of this paradoxical combination: Grosz directed his hatred at the upper classes, but like all satirists, his mockery was an attempt to expose vice. His hatred was fueled by disappointment.

Schweineschlachten auf dem Lande (Pig Slaughter in the Countryside), 1927, reed pen and pen and ink on paper, 18 1/8 x 23 5/8 inches. Signed and dated lower right recto. Courtesy David Nolan Gallery.

In a small set of eight drawings at David Nolan Gallery, made between 1927 and 1931, depicting the workaday world of small town butchers, Grosz temporarily turns away from high society antagonism, and concentrates on life as it is in the streets and shops. Here, his general misanthropy is mitigated by a competing perspective: that of admiration. Grosz, who had joined the Communist party in 1918, sought to elevate the status of even the supposedly lowliest worker, and this comes through in the drawings. The laborers who populate the grisly world of the slaughterhouse are sketched with decisive strokes; great attention is paid to the positions of their feet and hands as they work. Shoulders feature more prominently here than in almost any other artwork I can think of – the earnest stoop of a worker bearing two buckets of water or blood; the man who bows under the weight of an entire sow across his back; the satisfied shrug of a butcher standing in the doorway of his shop, its window strung with carcasses. Though we may wish to shield ourselves from such everyday violence, Grosz’s pen and pencil linger, detailing an honesty and sincere persistence among these men and women.

Here, both skill and rectitude are physical characteristics. Resigned pigs are carted to slaughter by equally resigned laborers; the images are as concerned with the drama of small-scale murder as with the correct positioning of the bucket that catches the blood. This may be partly due to Grosz’s use of the reed pen, an instrument often used for calligraphy, which he applies here to delineate the force of muscles at work, and equipment well-used, with forceful yet delicate strokes. Though bodies are plentiful and expressive in the drawings, Grosz’s usual eroticism is absent; the forms depict character rather than voluptuous desire.

As the gallery press release points out, Grosz may have made these drawings in response to a severe meat shortage in Germany at the time. His countrymen were being forced to ration a staple of their diet that was, in fatter times, so ubiquitous as to be identified with the national character. For an artist who concerned himself with the study and derision of that character as it turned increasingly ominous, meat would be doubly corporeal: the stuff of death, and the stuff of life.

–Nova Benway, Curatorial Assistant

Terry Winters, Cricket Music, 2010. Oil on linen, 88 x 112 inches. © Terry Winters, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Last May, The Drawing Center’s young patrons group, On The Mark, had an inspiring visit with Terry Winters in his SoHo studio. On the occasion of his new exhibition of paintings and drawings at Matthew Marks gallery in Chelsea, curator Claire Gilman caught up with the influential American artist.

Terry Winters, Notebook 162, 2003-2011. Collage, 11 x 8 1/2 inches. © Terry Winters, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

CG: In your current exhibition at Matthew Marks you are showing new paintings inspired by your ongoing investigation into the intersection between mathematical concepts and natural or biological forces, and a series of rarely seen multilayered collages of found images that you have been working on for the last ten years. Could you comment on your decision to show these very different bodies of work together, now, for the first time?

TW: It just seemed that both groups of work could somehow inform one another. A number of collages were included in a group exhibition last spring in Austria. That was the first time they were shown publicly and it felt like the right time now to have them seen in New York.

CG: Where the paintings are titled Figures [Tessellation Figures (12), (6), (7) etc.], the drawings are titled Notebook (Notebook 1, 5, 15 etc.), and the press release describes the collages as containing found material that has served as a source of inspiration for your recent work.  Do you therefore consider the drawings to be studies for the paintings or a parallel practice with their own set of criteria and limiting conditions?  Given that the paintings are essentially abstract and the collages representational, how would you describe the relationship between form and content in both groups of work?

TW: The drawings and collages are a parallel activity, another mechanism for generating pictures. While often used in the painting process, they are not strictly studies. The struggle or focus is to arrive at an object that has an independent existence.

Hopefully, form and content are inseparable. The issue of abstraction and representation is a bit the same – each element exists in both sets of work to different degrees. There’s a graduated system of ambiguity. Technical images – photographs and computer print-outs – are used with a combination of forces to produce new abstract pictures.

CG: In general, could you discuss the relationship between painting and drawing in your practice?  Once again, do you consider drawing to be a preparation for painting or a field of exploration in its own right, with its own unique requirements and goals?

TW: I see the drawings as complete in themselves. But some, once finished, suggest the potential for further development or investigation – whether through painting, printing or other drawing methods.

CG: What’s up next?  What are you working on now?

TW: More of the same! I’m working on new paintings and a group of related drawings with shows scheduled both here and in Europe.

CG: Congratulations on a beautiful show!

Random Walk Drawing (Window), 2011, Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Tom Powel.

Sarah Sze’s exhibition Infinite Line at Asia Society Museum articulates parallels between her drawing and sculpture practices, staging two distinct bodies of work at a synthesizing angle. Organized in two separate galleries, selected works on paper from 1996 to the present complement a series of new installations commonly titled Random Walk Drawing. “How do you make a sculpture that acts like a drawing?” the artist asks in an interview with exhibition curator Melissa Chiu. “How do you make a drawing that acts like a sculpture?” The show’s premise, focusing on correlative implementations of perspective and line, is an atypically detailed structural read of Sze’s practice, and the works on view are more discrete and concentrated than her frequently immersive installations. Though the exhibition risks a reductively neat reciprocality, its comparison of Sze’s drawings and sculptures ultimately holds water; the artist’s deft constructions act for themselves, driving both compositional lines and lines of sight with a compelling, perpetually emergent charge.

Untitled, 2005, Lithograph and silkscreen on rice paper, 46 3/8 x 16 in., sheet: 52 3/8 x 22 inches. Edition 24 of 40. Courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of Adam Reich.

Sze’s untitled lithograph (2005) and dyadic mixed media prints Night and Day (2003) are characterized by persistent kinetic flux. Implausible drawn architectures of ducts, pipes, helixes, and Escheresque staircases preclude a consummate focal point and digress into tangential, mutating tableaux. Sze describes these moments of figuration as “fleeting situations”: industrial pistons and siphons multiply, extend, and give rise to limbs and branches; plumbing networks of sinks, tubs, and toilets support platforms of stacked animal cages. A few vertically oriented scroll drawings caricature the modern condition in fits of lust, desolation, and ennui. A man huddles in the last of an isometric queue of shower cells; another leers over an adjacent precipice. Serial corporate office desks and supermarket carts protrude over salacious enclaves, operating tables, and mosh pits in a neo-Boschian garden of corporate-consumerist delights.

From shopping to sex to surgery, each drawing’s sundry vortex of activity stutters only for slight perspectival shifts. The episodes distinguish themselves with subtle angling, necessitating a sequential scan of the spectacle. Associate Curator Miwako Tezuka posits a relevant antecedent in a Chinese compositional mode based on the relative, mutable vantage of a moving subject, rather than the fixed-point linear perspective of the Western Renaissance. Accordingly, Sze’s line conducts and recycles a single pulse, evolving as the eye visits each individual locus in tandem.

Sze’s eight Random Walk Drawing installations register the engineered perspective and line-activated dynamism that define her drawings. Each structure is contained and self-referential but projective into the space around it; carefully positioned correspondences read as concept maps of objects. Along with her typical quotidian mass-produced products, Sze incorporates optical motifs (grids and radial designs evocative of perspectival schematics, eye charts, mirrors), as well as arcs that literally transition between vertical and horizontal axes to pilot her viewers’ gaze.

Informed by the performative and mimetic devices of Japanese garden design, Sze adapts the technique of shakkei, or borrowed scenery, to point to external or adjacent images from within her installations, just as garden landscaping may frame a distant vista. In Random Walk Drawing (Window), this effect is employed quite literally; a receding line of sight is traced by rocks extending on either side of a floor-to-ceiling window separating the gallery from a ledge overlooking Park Avenue. Flat photographs of rocks paper the floor and occlude part of the window, replacing an urban panorama with the abruptly cropped and compressed figure-ground of a representation. Long planks along the floor support images of horizons, another icon of contracted space and the limits of vision.

Through credibly analogous modes, both Sze’s sculptures and drawings probe faculties of the line in space and on paper, troubling perception and compelling her viewers’ active re-orientation in order to experience her systems unfold. -Kaegan Sparks, Special Events Associate

Self Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg with “Navigator (1962)", ca.1962. Copyright: Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

The Drawing Center is honored to be one of nine recipients of The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s first Artistic Innovation and Collaboration (AIC) grant, which will support the commission of a new collaborative performance series. The new works by Susan Hefuna and Luca Veggetti; Rashaad Newsome; and Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers will be presented during The Drawing Center’s first year of exhibitions following a major building expansion.

The Drawing Center’s Executive Director, Brett Littman, remarked, “We salute the vision that the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has for this new important funding initiative. This grant is a huge validation for our new programmatic ideas that we plan to explore post completion of our expansion project in 2012.  These are the kind of experimental and forward thinking exhibitions and events that will keep The Drawing Center’s mission relevant well into the 21st Century.”

Christy MacLear, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, commented,“We are delighted to support three of Drawing Center’s opening programs, which are collaborative and innovative at their core. What interested us particularly was the creative exploration into uncharted territory of what “drawing” is – less as a defined practice and more of a true process of discovery. Drawing, through these programs becomes a fearless exploration of new ideas in art – and that is what Robert Rauschenberg Foundation would love to support.”

www.rauschenbergfoundation.org

Trisha Brown, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, Dec. 9, 2011 – Jan. 25, 2012

Drawings by pioneer postmodern dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown are the main feature of her second solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea. Part of a longtime engagement with mark-marking adjunct to her dance practice, selections from Brown’s series “It’s a Draw” document the movements of her feet as she dances on paper.[i] Like her Judson Church colleague Yvonne Rainer’s recent book of poems,[ii] Brown’s drawings address a contemporary audience accustomed to intergenre code-switching. Yet critiques of dilettantism may be quick on the heels of the de-specialized, often impetuous forays into new disciplines endemic in today’s creative community. As Claire Bishop argues in a recent essay, an artist’s decision to reject the specific modes of production of his/her training for others, or de-skilling, “always requires a re-skilling if it is to convince us that it is more than simply amateur. On the most basic level, this re-skilling is rhetorical: being able to account for, persuasively narrate, and even theorize one’s disciplinary unraveling.”[iii] How effectively can Brown’s drawings hold their own as integrated formal compositions in a visual art context? Is their significance rather derivative of the ephemeral performances they index? Are Brown’s maneuvers between media limber enough for her drawings to withstand critique as objects?

Lining the walls of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. are 11 large drawings, each approximately 130 by 107 inches. As she moves atop paper flush with the floor, an oil pastel or piece of charcoal poised between Brown’s toes inscribes her perambulations. Emerging as languid arcs, tight whorls, isolated toe-touch daubs, heel scuffs, and occasional foot and fingerprints, incidental strokes map Brown’s contact with the ground, the moments between steps or leaps. A spectrum of rhythmic and tonal details can be teased out through reading the traces of her motions—light, sprawling and sparse; dense and angular—a vigorous shift even ripping the paper substrate in one case.

Trisha Brown, Untitled (Montpellier), 2002. Charcoal on paper, 130 x 106.75 inches. © Trisha Brown; Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Such a detail underscores Brown’s attention to positioning along vertical and horizontal axes—scuff marks become gestural as the drawings are transported from floor to wall, reorienting the viewer’s relationship to the performance, just as Brown’s infamous 1970 piece Man Walking Down the Side of a Building accomplished the exact inverse for dance. A subtle counterpart is Brown’s 1998 video Shot Backstage, exhibited alongside  the drawings, in which the choreographer videotaped her company’s performance from a lateral vantage between the stage curtains, perpendicular to the audience’s perspective.

In a series of short reflections which annotate cropped “It’s a Draw” works in Walker Art Center’s 2008 exhibition catalogue, Brown verbally reconstructs her movements from their visual vestiges. Of a particularly dark helical form she comments: “It felt like tar on my foot, and turning, and trying to create white striations also.”[iv] One questions whether these notes are a retrospective analysis of the traces, or expose a precedent formal intention—did Brown’s visual discretion bear upon her dancing as the drawings emerged or were they composed objectively from a continuous performance?  Were her movements circumscribed by the paper’s dimensions, or did she allow transgressions of its boundaries?  It is perhaps this very probing of motives—which comes first, the drawing or the dance?—that gives the work a generative discursive strength. In Brown’s drawings the two contexts are so precisely overlaid, the methodologies so confounded, that these ambiguities will remain active and suspended, making their viewing an engaging aesthetic and intellectual experience. Instead of grasping for a new context altogether, Brown’s drawings reapply and challenge her primary practice in a new medium, their very process sketching the frictions of the transfer. -Kaegan Sparks, Special Events Associate

____________________________________

^[i] Work from “It’s a Draw” is also pivotal to curator Helen Molesworth’s current exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Dance/Draw.

^[ii] Rainer, Yvonne. Poems. New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2011.

^[iii] Bishop, Claire. “UNHAPPY DAYS IN THE ART WORLD? De-skilling Theater, Re-skilling Performance.” The Brooklyn Rail December 2011/January 2012: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/12/art/unhappy-days-in-the-art-worldde-skilling-theater-re-skilling-performance

^[iv] Bither, Philip, Trisha Brown, and Peter Eleey. Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2008.

Will Cotton, Candy Cane Tree, 2006, 22 X 15 inches, ink and gouache on paper, courtesy of the artist and Mary Boone Gallery.

There are two ways to support The Drawing Center this holiday season with a tax-deductible contribution to either our Annual Fund or our Capital Campaign. Your gift to the Annual Fund helps sustain our exhibitions, publications, services for emerging artists, and educational programs. By giving to the Capital Campaign, you will contribute to a special fund used to support ReDraw: The Capital Plan for 35 Wooster Street, a major expansion of our permanent facility in SoHo.

During this exciting phase in institution’s history your support is more crucial now than ever. We hope you will consider The Drawing Center in your year-end giving. To make a secure donation to the Annual Fund online please click here. To make a contribution to the Capital Campaign, please call the Development office at (212) 219-2166 extension 219 or email crogati@drawingcenter.org.

Donate a total of $100 or more and receive a customized flash drive preloaded with five of The Drawing Center’s most highly acclaimed Drawing Papers publications.

Ludwig Bemelmans, De l'Audace, date unknown. Watercolor, gouache, brush and ink and wash with pastel on Marble Arch board, 30 x 21 1/2 inches

The exuberant title of the current show at Alex Zachary–Happy Holidays! Drawings!–is an immediate giveaway as to the spirit of the exhibition; it is structured less by any particular theme than by a jovial desire to present a group of intriguing, surprising, lovely images on paper. From Calder to Kilimnik, from Picabia to Richard Tuttle to Paul Thek, the show presents a wildly carousing–not to say chaotic and resolutely ahistorical–vision of some drawings of the last hundred years. Organized without attention to date or style, the show asks instead that each work be viewed one at a time, on its own terms, like the unwrapping of so many small but much-loved gifts.

The gallery itself is decked out with seasonal cheer: the walls are painted in black and white polka dots, some of the drawings sport ribbons on their frames, and a giant Christmas tree rises from the ground floor to the upper level of the two-story space. Such a fun-loving show could have come off as an almost shallow gesture, but at Alex Zachary it is organized with such panache that the invitation to simply enjoy looking, to move from one small frame to the next, feels both generous and substantive. Indeed, it is completely in the holiday spirit.

In the gallery’s entrance room, one finds Violetta Raditz’s crayon and pencil drawings of the early 1920s, featuring sumptuously colored, costumed figures, depicted in an ornate yet childlike hand. These ethereal characters partner with the watery Turbaned Figure, Tangier (c. 1976) by Duncan Grant, as well as the aforementioned Karen Kilimnik drawing Persian Room at New York’s Plaza (1996), a sketchy image of Barbra Streisand in an opulent fur hat (“When she goes, she goes all the way,” reads the accompanying text.) Downstairs, a selection of Pavel Tchelitchew’s costume designs for dancers describe each figure in angular and swooping lines.

Karen Klimnik, Persian Room at New York's Plaza, 1996. China Marker on paper, 40 x 26 inches.

Continuing the small-scale drama of the body, downstairs the viewer encounters Alexander Calder’s confrontation between a nude woman and a rearing horse (date unknown); Milton Avery’s whirling circus scene The Human Merry-Go-Round (c. 1932); and a work by Tom of Finland depicting a nude with his back to us, another man seeming to gaze intently at what the viewer cannot see (Untitled, preliminary drawing, 1980).

Considered here as circumscribed worlds unto themselves, the drawings project a particular kind of mysterious delight, and this show happily trades the usual preciousness attendant with works on paper for a jubilant celebration of each image in its own right. Indeed, a watercolor by Ludwig Bemelmans, depicting a voluptuous chorus girl offering herself to the crowd with awkward charm, is inscribed with what could be the modus operandi of the exhibition as a whole: “De l’Audace, De l’Audace, et encore de l’Audace [Audacity, Audacity and more Audacity]”! -Nova Benway, Curatorial Assistant

Construction continues on the expansion of our home in SoHo!

Below are the latest photographs marking ReDraw’s exciting progress. The demolition phase has opened up the Main Gallery to expose the framework of the space – brick walls, ceiling joist and all.

Stay tuned for continued updates as the building at 35 Wooster is transformed!

Main Gallery

Main Gallery, ceiling

Lower Level

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Study for The Death of Sardanapalus, Pen and brown ink, brown wash. Musée du Louvre Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. Photography: Franck Raux

Throughout the late eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth century, France underwent significant political, social, and cultural upheaval. The royal court was overthrown and the country suffered decades of regime change. Amid this turbulent climate, an incredibly productive artistic period was also underway. Embodying this bastion of creativity is a selection of eighty rarely seen works on paper from Paris’s Musée du Louvre, on view at The Morgan Library through December 31. David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre offers vivid proof that French art from the late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, like the politics of the time, was rife with contradictions—at once wildly excessive and even-keeled. As the French Revolution deposed the ancienne régime, the academic tradition of Neo-Classicism replaced Rococo ornamentation, which in turn, became supplanted by the formally liberated Romantics. The Morgan’s historically narrow selection of drawings by some the most celebrated draftsmen associated with Neo-Classicism and Romanticism typifies this stylistic progression.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), Study for The Turkish Bath, ca. 1859. Pen and brown ink, graphite, on two joined sheets of paper Musée du Louvre Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Thierry Le Mage

The shaky rhythm of this era begins with artist Jacques-Louis David, who pioneered a radical antidote to Neo-Classicism by substituting scenes from ancient history with Rococo images of courtly life. David’s evolution is traced through scenes from history, a profile portrait of a fellow member of the Revolution, and a preparatory drawing of Napoleon crowning himself emperor. Artists who trained in David’s studio are also on view, their individual approaches (and shifting political alliances) suggested by sleek line drawings of the Trojan War, episodes from Roman history in chiaroscuro, meticulous portraits, and frenetic battle scenes. Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s sumptuously modeled nudes, whose eloquent forms were created by subtle shadings of light to dark, demonstrate the academic tradition at its finest. The advent of Romanticism is highlighted by Théodore Géricault’s scrupulous explorations of pastoral and urban landscapes. In opposition to Géricault’s fluidity is the Neo-Classical incisiveness, often laced with erotic overtones, that is best seen in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s refined graphite portraits, which relied on the controlling logic of the drawn line. This contrast is particularly evident in the two studies for the Grande Odalisque (c.1814) and a pair of studies for the fantastical, Turkish Bath (c. 1859-60) with its anatomical elongation and exaggeration.

The exhibition presents more work by Eugène Delacroix than any other artist, from his exotic (almost abstract) preparatory sketches for the epic painting, Death of Sardanapalus, to more sensitive portraits of people in Morocco, where he traveled as part of the French colonialist enterprise. The show closes with an intimate, rarely-seen drawing by Honoré Daumier of a young woman who appears lost in handiwork. The image reveals Daumier’s ease with drawing materials; variations in black chalk lines suggest different tones and textures, and the subject’s life-like appearance demonstrates Daumier’s hidden aptitude for naturalism, though he was best known as a satirical caricaturist.

Such societal and political upheaval brought about dramatic changes in artistic style, content, and patronage. A new vitality swept through France’s artistic community, and practitioners who are today considered among the most outstanding were moving in important new directions. David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France chronicles this remarkable period of artistic ferment and captures the spirit of revolution onto the page. –Joanna Kleinberg, Assistant Curator

Join On The Mark before December 6 to receive a special membership rate and attend a private holiday party for young patrons! 

This year’s third annual On The Mark holiday celebration, held on Tuesday, December 6, will be hosted by collector Jean-Edouard Van Praet, whose impressive collection includes works by such artists as Sol LeWitt, Kara Walker, Carl Andre, and Richard Artschwager

On The Mark, The Drawing Center’s young patrons group, provides art enthusiasts in their twenties to early forties with a platform for engaging with the ever-evolving medium of drawing. Members enjoy all of the benefits of a Contributor level membership plus exclusive privileges in the following categories: Art Collecting 101, Leadership Development, Special Events, Private Studio Visits, Cultural Partnerships, Suggested Reading and Recognition.

Join On The Mark before December 6 and receive a $75 annual membership.* To join, contact Candace Rogati at crogati@drawingcenter.org or 212.219.2166 x219.

*Normally $200 annually. Special rate excludes Benefit Auction tickets.