Spaightwood Galleries

This show was prompted by our acquisition over the past few years of a number of old master drawings, including works by Bernaert van Orley, Lucas van Leyden (a hand-colored impression of one of his large engravings, Golgotha), Hans Sebald Beham and studio, Annibale Carracci, Federico Zuccaro, Pier Francesco Mola, Paolo di Matteis, Jan Baptiste de Wael, and works by contemporary followers of Veronese, Domenichino, and Rembrandt (Pieter de With, attributed). Some of these works appear to be finished drawings, others attempts to conceptualize an artistic problem to be solved, still others models for members of the master's workshop to execute in whole or in part under the master's supervision.

We also feature 18th- and 19th-century drawings by artists like Mouricault (three scenes from the legend of Cupid and Psyche, each done in a different technique), the Count d'Orsay's portrait of the diplomat Tallyrand, Theophile Chauvel (one of the Barbizon group), Heloise Suzanne Colin and Marianne Rohden, both wives and mothers of artists in addition to being well-known artists themselves, Adrian Ludwig Richter (one of whose watercolors sold at auction recently for $22, 220), Wilhelm Richter, Johann Mader, Otto Greiner, Emil Kinkelin, Adalbert Wolfe, Felix O. C. Darley (Winslow Homer's model for shaping an artistic career) and others. We are also featuring works by more recent artists like Albert Besnard, Nataliya Goncharova (a beautiful and early abstract composition done in Russia c. 1913; one of her paintings sold at Sotheby's London in 1996 for $395,000), the sculptor Reuben Nakian, Rudolf Schlichter, the German Expressionist master (and friend of George Grosz), Marcel Vertes, Isabel Bishop, Aaron Bohrod, Joan Root, Phyllis McGibbon, Warrington Colescott's drawing for The Last Printmaker in his History of Printmaking Series, outsider-artist Simon Sparrow, and many others. We are also presenting a large group of drawings ranging from the late 15th century to the 19th by that famous artist, "Anonymous" (his/her name is legion!). Our new acquisitions complement the drawings we already had by such modern and contemporary artists as Pierre Alechinsky, Joan Gardy Artigas, Jim Bird, Claude Garache, John Himmelfarb, Manel Lledos, the COBRA artist Lucebert, and Gerard Titus-Carmel, all of whose works are also in the show. We include as well a monoprint by Joan Miro whose chief compositional element is a very elaborate signature as a kind of cross between a print and a drawing. We are also showing a brand new group of pastels by Jonna Rae Brinkman, who flew here for the opening, but has since gone back to New York to set up her new studio.

Thinking and looking at our newly expanded drawing inventory, we began thinking about the variety of our drawings and the various purposes for which they were made. In this show we want not merely to show some extraordinarily beautiful drawings but also to invite viewers to consider some of the many kinds of drawings, the multiplicity of uses of drawings, and the varying degrees of artistry of drawings, ranging from masters to amateurs. Because, particularly in the case of earlier artists, drawings were sometimes intended to be for the use of the artist and his assistants, remaining as valued property of the workshop for years, they are not always clearly identified on the sheet and attribution becomes a matter of interpretation. For one example, see the page on Pier Francesco Mola; for another, we offer the commentary below from Diane De Grazia, Correggio and His Legacy: Sixteenth-Century Emilian Drawings (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1984): "The Brussels drawing is catalogued as a Zuccaro, but Anthony Blunt has suggested that it is the work of Francesco Vanni. However the application of red and black chalk is typical of Federico, and an attribution to him can be made with some security, Although the facial features of the more finished figures reflect those of Corregio, several of the lightly sketched angels in the background betray Federico's hand." As the history of the attribution of Rembrandt's paintings over the past forty years by a select committee trying to establish a definitive canon of his works, in which his numbers first sunk from a total of about 700 down to nearly 300, and have since risen to about 500 suggests, even experts can disagree and often the attributions of old master paintings and drawings may change from decade to decade even within the same museum based upon both the current state of knowledge about both artist and period and upon the changing knowledge of the expert doing the attributing.