Reading Drawings: A Selection From The Victoria and Albert Museum

Reading Drawings: A Selection From the Victoria & Albert Museum presented 121 masterpieces of drawing in a comprehensive exhibition illustrating how and why drawings were made. Organized by Susan Lambert, Deputy Keeper of the drawings collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the exhibition interpreted drawings as widely as possible, bringing together examples from different countries and periods. The exhibition was loosely divided into four categories: technique, drawing as discipline, drawing as imagination, and drawing for utility.

Drawings in the first category — technique — were selected with a view to examining their physical makeup. Works by artists such as Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594), Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), and Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) illustrated the instruments of technique such as paper, implements and media, drawing aids and gadgets, and correction devices.

Works within the second category — drawing as discipline — traced the role of drawing in the development of all types of artists since the Renaissance. Examples here included copies of other drawings and paintings, drawings from life and sculpture, and exercises and technical manuals by artists ranging from Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) to Fernand Leger (1881–1955).

Drawing as imagination was a category that showed the mind of the artist finding graphic form without intending a finished work of art. Examples by Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488), Canaletto (1697-1768), Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Natalia Gontcharova (1881-1964), and David Hockney (1937-2026) were used to illustrate the concept of artists "thinking on paper," and drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), and Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) were intended as ends in themselves.

Drawings had long been used as a means of explaining what a completed work in another medium would look like. Drawing as utility included presentation drawings, diagrams, and technical illustrations, and record and pattern drawings by such masters as Sir John Soane (1753-1837), Thomas Chippendale (c. 1718-1779), and Georges Braque (1882-1963).

Accompanying the exhibition was a catalog published by Trefoil Books, London, with an introductory essay by Susan Lambert. All of the works in the exhibition were reproduced, many of them in color. The catalog was distributed in the United States by Pantheon Books. The exhibition traveled to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and to the Worcester Art Museum.