Drawing Near to the Divine
A BRITISH MUSEUM TOURING EXHIBITION
BRINGS RUBENS, DA VINCI, AND MICHELANGELO
DRAWINGS TO THE NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF ART.
By Isabel Seligman
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S
“
UPPOSE ONE COULD CATCH THEM BEFORE
they become ‘works of art?’ Catch them hot &
sudden as they rise in the mind.” In her diary,
Virginia Woolf examined the stuff of thought, its
shape and contours as well as its inherent slipperiness. While she was largely concerned with literature,
her questions apply just as well to the visual arts. What does
an idea look like before it is labored over, crafted, and shaped
into a finished piece?
The answer, for artists, is usually a drawing. Drawing
provides a means of expression unhindered by materials or
labor—the opportunity to act and communicate almost at the
speed of thought. Drawings thus offer privileged insights into
an artist’s mind at the moment of creation. What better place
for a student of art to begin? While now out of fashion and
often considered regressive, inauthentic, or derivative, copy
drawing was once the foundation of any artistic education. A
cornerstone of the Renaissance workshop, the artist Cennino
Cennini, author of one of the first manuals on painting,
considered it so vital that in The Craftsman’s Handbook (written
around 1399) he advised students to begin by drawing from
an existing model every day, for “No matter how little it is, it
will be well worth while, and will do you the world of good.”
After the foundation of the Louvre in the eighteenth century,
the National Assembly decreed that five days out of every ten
were reserved solely for artists to copy, one of the primary
reasons the museum came to be known as “the laboratory of
French art.”
This article grew out of a three-year project supported by the
Bridget Riley Art Foundation to encourage art students to visit
the collection of prints and drawings in the British Museum, to
be inspired by them, and to draw from them. The first strand of
the project was a program of workshops in the British Museum
for students at art schools in and around London. The second
was a touring exhibition of drawings from the collection, which
had been road tested during these workshops, an opportunity
to discover those drawings students found the most engaging
and exciting. The exhibition’s curators conceived it particularly
to appeal to artists and art students beyond London, and since
it includes some of the undisputed highlights of the museum’s
collection, it can be enjoyed by anyone wishing for insights
Opposite: Figure 1. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), The Virgin and Christ Child
with a Cat (recto), ca. 1478–81. Pen and brown ink and wash over stylus underdrawing. 1856,0621.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
into the processes of both drawing and thinking. Having
recently completed its UK tour of three venues associated with
art schools, Lines of Thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to Now
opened at the New Mexico Museum of Art on May 27th, and
will travel to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in
September of this year.
Like the Louvre in the eighteenth century, the British
Museum also has a longstanding tradition of individual artists
using its collection for inspiration. Today, it holds one of the
world’s richest collections of Western prints and drawings,
over two million works on paper from the Renaissance to the
contemporary, which the public can consult in the department’s
Study Room. Until two years ago, however, there were no formal
partnerships with art schools. In 2014, only two art student
classes were scheduled for a visit. When the museum initially
approached professors at art schools to discuss the possibility
of workshops, the reaction was that students might be hostile to
drawing and were more likely to keep a blog than a sketchbook.
This refrain was familiar to the artist Bridget Riley, in its spirit
if not its letter, from her time as an art student in London in the
1950s. By the time she was a student at Goldsmiths, University of
London, the institution already viewed drawing as something that
could be dispensed with. Life drawing classes were optional, and
it was only due to Riley’s own conviction that it could benefit her
artistic development that she enrolled in them. She also went to
the British Museum Study Room to see drawings by past masters
for herself. Riley has credited observational drawing as the key to
all of her subsequent discoveries in painted abstraction, noting
in her essay “At the End of My Pencil” (2009), “It is this effort to
‘clarify’ that makes drawing particularly useful, and it is this way
that I assimilate experience and find new ground.”
S
INCE Riley’s student days copying drawings, including
assiduous inquiry into the methods of masters such as
Georges Seurat and Henri Matisse, her continual interrogation of the mechanics of optical phenomena, and key role as a
leading figure in the Op art movement, ensured her recognition as one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists. She
established the Bridget Riley Art Foundation in 2011. Hoping
to ensure that other students might have such access to drawings of the highest quality, the foundation initiated an ambitious, three-year project to allow art students to discover the
incredible resources offered by the British Museum’s graphic
collection, and inspire them to draw themselves. Over the past
two years, a small team, comprising Sarah Jaffray, Rebecca
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The impetus behind the touring exhibition had
been to give art students outside London access to
drawings of the highest quality. The workshops
were a real opportunity to work in dialogue with a
similar audience and to ask them questions about
how they perceived drawing, its function, and its
possibilities. In addition to our discussions, we
handed out feedback questionnaires so that we
could get some of these answers on paper. They
have proved to be a valuable resource.
Many students questioned the idea of drawing
from drawings, and were initially resistant to it.
We found it necessary to explain that from its very
inception drawing from drawings was neither
mechanical nor innocent. The process is not an
effort to replicate a work, but to understand it,
and it’s thus an intellectual as much as a manual
exercise. Cennini recommended that students draw
“only a little each day, so that you might not come
to lose your taste for it,” while Joshua Reynolds
advised students at the Royal Academy in London,
“Instead of copying the touches of those great
masters, copy only their conceptions.” The process
is not necessarily the attempt to acquire a skill, so
Above: Drawing from drawings in the British Museum Study Room. Photograph by Isabel Seligman.
much as questioning what a skill might look like,
and this endeavor to learn from the achievements
Birrell, and me, have led more than a hundred workshops at
and mistakes of others can also become an investigation of
the Museum for over 1,000 students practicing in all areas of
one’s own practice. When alienated from his artistic contemfine art, including painting, sculpture, performance, instalporaries, Henri Matisse went to the Louvre to make copies, in
lation, video, sound, photography, and film. Our aim was to
his words, “to understand myself.”
re-introduce drawing as a fundamental and transformative tool
Some wonderful examples of such analytical and interprein each of these disciplines. tive drawings were recently on display at the British Museum,
We wanted to illustrate the broadest chronological range,
where last year student works were shown beside the drawfrom the fifteenth century to the contemporary, in the widest
ings that had inspired them. Two different approaches led
possible range of media. Ink as used by Francisco Goya and
one student, Ying Zhou, to create her own drawn response.
Rachel Whiteread, red chalk by Jean-Antoine Watteau and
The first was a mode of looking implied in a drawing by the
Edda Renouf, drawings in charcoal by Albrecht Dürer and
contemporary artist Ariane Laroux (fig. 2), seen as if through
Willem de Kooning, and silverpoints by Paul Noble and
an accumulation of discrete glances. The second was a study of
Raphael. From inchoate doodles to highly finished presentasculpture by Paul Cézanne drawn continually over the course
tion drawings, we wanted to give students a taste of the treaof thirty years. Drawn from photographic collages of fractured
sures available. In addition to an introduction for students, we
statuary, Zhou’s work seems to crystallize numerous glimpses
saw these workshops as fact-finding missions. They allowed us
into a kaleidoscopic melee, while also making striking use of
to identify students’ interests, modes of practice, and engagethe empty reserves of the paper in a manner that responds
ment. How, if at all, did drawing feature in their practice, and
to the work of both Cézanne and Laroux. Another student,
Eliza Wimperis, was moved by what she called the “peculiar
how could looking at other types of drawings develop this?
46 E l P a l a c i o
are all visible in drawings by artists working centuries apart,
and bringing their work together demonstrates what can be
learned from looking at masters of the past in the context of
those working today.
T
HE exhibition opens with a brief introduction to the
vast chronological sweep of drawing as a thinking
medium, showing second thoughts and revisions in drawings
made nearly 3,000 years apart. The first is a sheet of papyrus
showing a spell from the Book of the Dead, made in 940
BC. It shows the final judgement scene where the priestess
Nestanebtasheru’s heart is being weighed. At first glance, the
drawing might seem static and finished, but closer inspection
reveals red draft lines where the anonymous artist originally
planned out the composition. In this way you can also see the
Figure 2. Ariane Laroux (b. 1957), Le bijoutier, 1985. Graphite. British Museum,
2001,0929.11 © Reproduced by permission of the artist / Image © The Trustees
of the British Museum.
physicality” of a gestural spiral form in a charcoal drawing by
the German artist Elke Wagner. In order to examine this, Eliza
drew her response not by hand, but with the pencil attached to
her foot as it moved through the five classical ballet positions
(fig. 4). As well as exploring the technical restraint and control
of the body as a means of expression across disciplines, her
response also exemplifies the translation of bodily movement
to marks on a page that lies at the heart of all drawing.
After we used these workshops as a testing ground to find out
which sorts of drawings students found particularly engaging,
our next challenge was to come up with an exhibition structure
that might embrace all of them. The twentieth-century conceptual and performance artist Joseph Beuys referred to drawing
as his “thinking medium,” and this is a particularly apt phrase
because it reveals the duality of the process, which is both a
vehicle for recording thought and prompting it, a medium in
which to think. There are numerous art historical precedents
for this conception of drawing: the sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari referred to drawings as thoughts, and the
seventeenth-century critic Roger de Piles described drawing as
“the manner in which the Painter thinks things.” Lines of Thought:
Drawing from Michelangelo to Now is thus structured around the
premise of drawing as a thinking medium, with works grouped
not chronologically, but according to the different types of
thought process that drawing both records and demands. Initial
thoughts, brainstorming, inquiry, association, and development
Figure 3. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Study of a Plaster Cupid, ca. 1890. Graphite.
British Museum, 1935,0413.2 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
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Figure 4. Eliza Wimperis (b. 1994), Untitled #1, 2016. Film still. © Eliza Wimperis.
artist’s numerous modifications and adjustments, sensing the
movements of a hand and mind 3,000 years ago. The second
is a contemporary drawing by the British artist Michael Landy,
Study for Break Down, 2000, a plan for a piece in which the
artist destroyed all 7,227 of his possessions. Both drawings
are concerned with ritual and performance, and both are
also maps for a potential afterlife. As Landy’s drawing only
escaped destruction because he gave it away to his dealer (who
subsequently donated it to the museum) before the start of the
piece, both drawings are also startling relics of a process which
should have resulted in their annihilation.
The exhibition’s subsequent sections take us through five
different types of thought processes fundamental to artistic
creation, beginning with the recording of initial thoughts, ideas,
and impressions. Drawing is often the fastest and easiest way
to externalize an idea, acting almost at the speed of thought.
Historically described as primi pensieri or “first thoughts,” this
type of exploratory drawing can provide clues as to how artists
approach problems or proposals, formulate questions for themselves, or how the germ of an idea is born. Two such germs are
visible in works by Auguste Rodin and Peter Paul Rubens (figs.
5 and 6). According to his contemporaries, Rodin used to dash
off drawings without taking his eyes off the model, “with only
his brain to guide it.” While Rodin reputedly produced scores
of these drawings per day, a mere handful would be selected for
further development. Similarly, Rubens’ frenzied depiction of
dancers is so speedily penned, they almost seem to be escaping
from the page. In their abbreviated form, the figures contain an
energy suggesting the very earliest stages of an idea.
As well as catching initial ideas, drawing can also be used
to generate multiple ones through brainstorming. This method
hinges upon excess, where an artist throws down a profusion of
ideas onto the page, many of which will be discarded. In generating multiple possibilities, brainstorming provides a vital space
for the testing of ideas, placing them side by side for comparison,
or on top of one another in a palimpsest. It enables a kind of
thinking through doing, and evaluation is avoided until a later
stage. A fabulous example is Michelangelo’s study for the Last
Judgement on the wall of the Sistine Chapel. Grappling with
configurations of falling and twisting bodies, we have an incredible insight into an extremely flexible stage of the working process.
Three crouching figures at upper left are most likely an alternative idea for those directly below them, yet while most
figures made it into the final composition with minor
adjustments, only one, the angel strangling the damned
soul, at center left, was removed, perhaps deemed too
unorthodox for the papal chapel. Likewise, in a drawing
by Richard Hamilton in which he imagines a scene from
the “lotus eaters” episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the
text describes Leopold Bloom’s genitals as “a languid
floating flower.” While there are numerous attempts
at many types of flowers, there is also a mushroom,
perhaps left for the sake of further ideas it might spark.
T
Figure 5. Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), Female nude, ca. 1900–17. Graphite with watercolor.
1931,0721.5 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
48 E l P a l a c i o
HE third section explores drawing as a method
of inquiry, showing observational studies, and
methodical and system-based drawings, alongside
inquiries into the nature and process of drawing itself.
Here, the exhibition examines life drawing and the
A wonderful example is Jean-Antoine Watteau’s perspicacious
study of hart’s tongue ferns, from a perspective that asks us
to get right down on the ground with him. This also resulted
in an unexpected and unconventional view of an eighteenthcentury house in the distance, most likely a by-product of the
artist’s original inquiry (fig. 8). The impact of chance and its
use as a stimulus for associative thought is visible in landscape
drawings by Alexander Cozens, who used a “blot” technique
to stimulate his invention, and by Ithell Colquhoun, a British
surrealist who, in 1954, used automatic drawing in ink as a
vehicle for the exploration of the unconscious.
A
Figure 6. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Dancing Figures, All Linking Hands, ca.
1627–28. Pen and brown ink. 1920,1012.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
formal probing of abstract elements, along with works that
inquire about the properties of materials and push the boundaries of drawing as a practice. Works by Paul Cézanne and
Stephen Willats both show the intense investigation of still
life elements. Cézanne’s obsession lasted over thirty years, as
he continually drew the sculpture from different angles and in
combination with other objects. Meanwhile, Willats’s Conceptual
Still-Life creates links between objects on a table verbally, rather
than visually, illustrating connections between objects including
a tin can, chalk, and the table itself, such as “detachable parts,”
“soft in feeling,” and “extensions of the hand.” Figure studies,
including one made by Pablo Picasso in 1906–7 during the eighteen months that he was working on his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,
are testament to the enduring power of drawing to examine the
human form. Another sparkling study by Georges Seurat examines how the volumes of two fashionably dressed figures will fit
into the theatrical setting of his infamous Grande Jatte (fig. 7).
Drawing is an excellent problem-solving tool, but a disciplined analytical method is only one approach to any problem.
The process of drawing is particularly conducive to associative
thinking, complementing a more rational inquiry with the
space in which to explore and dream. Answers often appear
in the places we least expect them, and studies suggest that
brain mechanisms used to work out a problem methodically
are very different from, and yet equally important to, those
employed when an answer appears seemingly out of nowhere.
FTER any initial exploration and experiment, ideas need
to undergo a process of development and definition,
discarding elements that don’t work, and refining those that
do. This process includes as much destruction as creation. In
this section, drawings allow us to see artists changing their
minds, revising and retracting. Such drawings thus offer us
Figure 7. Georges Seurat (1859–91), Study for La Grande Jatte, 1884. Conté crayon,
touched with pen and dark gray ink. 1968,0210.16 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
E l P a l a c i o 49
Figure 8. Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), Plants and Grasses with Buildings in the Background, ca.
1714–15. Black chalk, with gray wash. 1891,0713.11 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
a unique chance to view the minds of some of
the world’s most astonishing artists in operation. One such example is Bridget Riley’s study
for Blaze (fig. 9), meticulously constructed with
the aid of a compass, the dynamic thrust and
counter-thrust of the chevrons are obscured in
the center by a collaged piece of paper, correcting
the central passage. Albrecht Dürer’s study for
Nemesis also employed the stylus and compass in
its construction—according to a strict canon of
Vitruvian proportion, visible in the incised grid
underneath the figure—trying out both different
wings for the figure of fortune, and correcting
the buttocks by replacing them a square higher.
Meanwhile, both Claude Lorrain and Leonardo
da Vinci (fig. 1) exploit the double-sided sheet to
develop a drawing by holding it up to the light.
While Claude reverses and simplifies his dazzling
study of the Roman campagna, Leonardo clarifies
his choice for a modification of a Virgin and Child
with a cat—the application of wash strengthening
one choice and obliterating the other with a stroke
of the brush.
So far thousands of students and artists have
visited the drawings on their tour of the UK, and
in the US they will no doubt continue to spark
exciting responses in each of their new contexts.
Paul Valery wrote that there is “no art which calls
for the use of more intelligence than drawing…
every mental faculty finds its function in the task.”
It’s my hope that Lines of Thought will enable a
new generation of artists to experience the almost
endless possibilities drawing allows them; to
experiment, to analyze, and above all to think. n
Isabel Seligman is the Bridget Riley Art Foundation Exhibition
Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British
Museum, and curator of the exhibition Lines of Thought.: Drawing
from Michelangelo to Now.
Figure 9. Bridget Riley (b. 1931), Study for Blaze, 1962. Pen and brush drawing in black ink and collage.
2004,0601.36 © 2017 Bridget Riley. All rights reserved / Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.
50 E l P a l a c i o
Lines of Thought | events
PUBLIC LECTURE
ART OF THE DRAW
May 27; 1–2 p.m., St. Francis Auditorium
A special presentation with Isabel Seligman, curator, Lines of Thought:
Drawing from Michelangelo to Now, and Hugo Chapman, Simon
Sainsbury Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
Four Santa Fe cultural institutions will celebrate Art of the Draw
during the summer of 2017. The Art of the Draw collaboration includes
the New Mexico Museum of Art’s exhibition Lines of Thought:
Drawing from Michelangelo to Now; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s
presentation of its namesake’s drawings in conjunction with her
paintings; the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts’ exhibition
Action Abstraction Redefined; and the Santa Fe Desert Chorale’s 2017
Summer Festival Season, which will feature a score dedicated to
Pablo Picasso. The Art of the Draw collaboration received a generous
grant from the City of Santa Fe’s Art Commission.
FRIDAY EVENING CONVERSATIONS
June 2, June 16, and July 14; 6–7 p.m.
Museum volunteer guides present fifteen-minute pop-up talks
prompting conversations about drawings in Lines of Thought.
SUMMER SALON
June 9, July 14, and August 11; 3–4:30 p.m.
Summer Salon offers visitors a chance to engage in the artistic
process of sketching and drawing with the guidance of talented local
artists. Artists will demonstrate a variety of drawing techniques
inspired by the art and architecture of the museum. Bring your own
materials, or borrow the museum’s.
ARTISTS’ DRAW OFF
June 4, July 2, and August 6; 12–1 p.m.
In the summer of 1924, John Sloan and Will Shuster went out
sketching. Sloan suggested that they paint each other and Shuster
agreed. On three Sundays, two local artists will draw each other in the
museum’s courtyard while visitors watch.
SUNDAY FUN DAY FOR FAMILIES
June 4, July 2, and August 6; 10 a.m–12 p.m.
Enjoy hands-on, do-it-yourself art activities designed for all ages:
a scavenger hunt with prizes and drawing activities. Art materials
provided by museum. Children must be chaperoned by adults.
n The current Georgia O’Keeffe Museum installation, A Great
American Artist, A Great American Story, runs through October. The
galleries showcase several drawings in conjunction with finished
paintings. These pairings demonstrate how O’Keeffe worked out
her ideas of abstraction and composition before picking up her
paintbrush. Throughout the summer, the Museum will explore this
theme, featuring presentations and drawing workshops for artists of
all skills and ages.
n The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts exhibition
Action Abstraction Redefined runs from July 7, 2017 through
December 31, 2018. Pieces and drawings featured in the exhibition
are from MoCNA’s permanent collection and were created in the
1960s and 70s at IAIA.
n The eighth movement of Francis Poulenc’s Figure Humaine,
dedicated to Pablo Picasso, is a highlight of the Santa Fe Desert
Chorale’s program Liberté: Music of Resistance and Revolution.
August 5, 8, 11, 2017.
Find out more at nmculture.org/artofthedraw.
DROP IN AND DRAW (ONGOING)
June 1–September 17; 10 a.m.–5 p.m. daily
Be inspired by Lines of Thought, and then draw on your own. Bring
your own materials, or borrow the museum’s.
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