Drawing, as an art form, is somewhat like silent movies or black and white movies in that they call attention to their artiface until they have established themselves well enough in your mind so that a drawing can be appreciated in its own terms, as a full blown kind of art. In the case of silent and black and white movies, these limitations are imposed by the limitations of the technology of that time, it taking a while for sound and then color, a mere ten or fifteen years later than color, to come to the movies. But even during the silent era, where films were interrupted by dialogue cards that had to keep talk clear and crisp, film had already developed most of its techniques: close, medium and long shots; novelistic story lines that combined public events with private life; deep investigation of character; angle shots so that railroad trains moved from upper right to disappear lower left; and so on. The audience adjusting its expectations of verisimilitude so that it could engage with very delightful stories, just as happened when audiences accepted the richly textured black and white of film noir so as to enhance its eerie and emotionally dark qualities, forgetting that it needed to be black and white after all, regardless of the mood conveyed, even though black and white musicals had been aglow with the lights and elaborate costumes designed for how they would look in black and white. The limitations of the technology did not seem so harmful that some directors, including Woody Allen, preferred to make their early films in black and white, to work under its limitations, rather than risk getting color wrong before they were ready to do it that way.
Now to drawings, which have been with us since cave man days. In the modern world it is thought of as a preparation for doing oil and other color canvases but emerges as its own kind of thing in that it expresses the tenuousness of doing any sort of art at the same time that it communicates wholey and in itself a way of being an art. I make the following observations having in mind the drawings now on exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute that are taken from its Gray Collection.
Before considering drawings that are done as preparations for oil or color canvases, consider those that are finished works of art in that they have been brought to completion after considerable effort, as was the case with Ingres, who did many completed drawings of his subjects, and even, in the case of his “Comtesse Charles d’Agoult and her Daughter”, which took him three days of sittings to complete, and so was clearly not dashed off. Where, for example, is the thin line we would have supposed was needed whereby the artist would have very elegantly indicated the separation between a face and its surroundings? If, in drawing, there is no color, then the face and its surroundings are both white or whitish and so something is needed to indicate the difference between a face, recognized for its character and its fleshiness, and everything that is background or complement to that. There is no such line because Ingres is even more parsimonious than that. There is a line to indicate chin in one of the two women and some shading to reveal a chubby face in the other, but no absolute separation between face and surroundings, that provided by the eye of the observer who imagines that the cheek of the young woman recedes when it reaches her jaw line and that the limits of the older woman’s face is set by her hair and the shading beneath her jaw. This is quite a successful way in which drawing implies more than is there and we, the viewers, do not feel cheated by contemplating a face that is merely indicated rather than “real”, it filled out with color and shape.
Ingres also uses minimalist techniques to draw the severe hairdos of his two models. They both have straight hair ending in buns, as was fashionable at the time. He accomplishes this by drawing many parallel lines close together but interrupting them with a pattern that emulates the light would be striking their heads, and so the absence of strokes indicates reflected light and so gives a roundness to their heads. An even more striking example of his detail work are the draped dresses of the two women, one in a pattern and the other without, that are rendered through lines that allow for their drapings while still continuing the pattern. It would take a very good eye, even at a sitting, to duplicate that with a graphite pencil.
The ability of drawing to use minimal resources to provide a complete picture is perhaps best fulfilled by some of Picasso’s later drawings. The one in the Gray Collection, entitled “Reclining Nude (Sleeping Woman)” (image not available) uses very few lines, those widely separated, to more than suggest the drapery which a sheet covering a nude body would supply, the sheet drawn aside so as to show one of the woman’s breasts and the start of her pubic hair, so that these private parts are caught, as it were, in repose, in that the subject does not know that they can be seen, and so makes the sense of the woman exposed all the more intense, she carrying around these treasures even when she is sleeping and so unaware of them. Very provocative and very simply done.
Now consider drawings that were not done to be things in themselves but as studies for full blown paintings. These are properly referred to as “sketches” because they are the blueprints for a painting that may give detail to some of the problems that will be encountered in the painting itself, such as the proportions or perspective on a limb or a figure or even on the entire concept of a painting: do the parts fit together and maintain a perspective or line of sight? That is clearly the case with David’s “Nude Soldiers Gesticulating with Their Weapons”, part of which was used in the portrayal of a soldier in David’s full scale painting, “The Intervention of the Sabine Woman”, which is his romanticized take on Poussin’s “The Rape of the Sabine Women”, a woman becoming a heroine rather than just a victim. The physicality of the soldier is not very important in the painting.
But as the title of the sketch, “Nude Soldiers Gesticulating with Their Weapons”, suggests, David was in the sketch trying to capture the way nude men moved, how their skeletons responded to their gestures. So much attention is paid in this sketch to what happens to the back of the soldier whose back is turned upon the viewer. The line between his shoulder blades and his buttocks is heightened, as well as the clenching of his buttocks and the extended posture from head to toes, belly drawn in. This is what a beautiful man looks like, which is different from a beautiful woman, as we just learned from Picasso, whose women are fleshy. The other figures in the painting are also portraits of the way men stand, sometimes legs apart, sometimes the man leaning on one leg, their private parts just appendages to their geometry, which is tense, while certainly to Picasso’s mind, the nude woman is relaxed. These men are out for business and the group portrait indicates that through their leg musculature, which was a preoccupation for this study. The sketch survives as a kind of work of art because it allows focussing on its parts: the ways male legs work, now this way and now that way, so that these are superimpositions of distinct studies rather than a composite portrait, just as many times an artist will draw an arm or a face on a piece of paper already taken up with its subject because that is a study for a more complete painting.
Picasso does just that in one of the multiple drawings of his that are in the Gray Collection. “Female Nude”, from 1906, (image not available) is a drawing of one of his solidly built nude women, legs like tree trunks, no slim waist, and a prominent belly. On the same paper is also drawn a face worth looking at for itself alone because the deep set eyes and the elongated face makes even this sketch into being one of an interesting person. It is not too much of a leap to speculate that one of the principles of composition that Picasso developed for his work in the Thirties was based on this perception of the multiplicity of subjects in a single sketch. His late drawing, from 1962, “Portrait of Jacqueline'' (image not available), also included in the Gray Collection (which is indeed very comprehensive, stretching from the Renaissance to the Post-Modern), shows body parts exaggerated or lopsized, as if there were no need to give them a realistic representation. That evokes, in my mind, Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror”, from 1932, where the body is filled not with organs but with different sensations of being human, all exposed, as in an anatomy lab, through cutting into the skin and exposing them, however disparate and non-anatomical they may be even if they are supposed to look like insides, as is the case, to cite one example, where there are a set of ribs covering half her body, She also has a distended belly, overly round breasts, and an internal space, perhaps for a baby. The mirror image is different. There are green stripes across her body and these cannot be taken for her ribs, but the belly and breasts are the same, as if those were intractable features of womankind, even as the two faces are differently colored. No more than you can step into the same stream twice, you can’t step twice into the same picture, Picasso is saying.
Return to the analogy of the silent movie, which anthropologists have reported that primitives do not understand because they have never seen life in black and white-- though I doubt that because all of us can imagine a black and white world as a limitation of what we do see. Sometimes, as in the movie “Pleasantville”, a black and white world is imagined as emotionally impoverished, that color is at least a symbol of a rich emotional life. But that does not stand up very well because the characters in black and white movies were often emotionally rich. The same was true in silent movies because the actors said it with their faces. So drawings can be emotionally rich, as we all know from cartoons, and that is certainly true of the masterful drawings on view in Chicago. So what do we gain and lose by transitioning from one to the other?
The truth of the matter is that art is always a cooperative effort in which the audience or viewers complete the sketch that they have been provided by the artist or the novelist. The reader fills in the time that has passed in a novel, knowing that the novel elides the longueurs that take place in everyday life. Dickens and Collins will show a character beginning or ending a long walk, but not the time the walk takes. A film, whether silent or talkie or in color, will use its combination of shots to select what it is the audience is to attend to, which is very different from seeing live opera, where the audience has to pick out which part of the stage to look at, sometimes at the sets, sometimes at the chorus, sometimes at the lead singers. The same thing is true with both sketches and paintings. In sketches, the viewer makes the people real rather than stick figures or just sets of lines, reading in that they are full characters even if in a colorless world made up of lines rather than swatches of color, and even in full blown portraits, the audience provides the knowledge of the conventions of perspective to make of those represented into three rather than two dimensional figures. We don’t live in “Flatland”, after all. All art is conventional but that does not mean it does not come to life in our minds-- in all of our minds, at least since caveman days.