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Between Transcendence and Brutality: American Sculptural Drawings from the 1940s and 1950s. - book reviews
Art Journal, Winter, 1994 by Nancy Grove
Sculptors draw for as wide a variety of reasons as do painters, but the relationship between drawing and sculpture is made more complex by the gap between two dimensions and three. Drawings serve as studies or models for works in progress, or, as in Rodin's drawings over photographs of his sculptures, they are ways of exploring possible changes in an existing piece. Drawing also provides a method of notation for ideas that would be difficult or impossible to realize in three dimensions; or it can be a way of exploring interests altogether different from those of sculpture.
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Whether used as an independent activity or as a way of thinking about, rethinking, or dreaming of sculpture, drawing has become especially important in the twentieth century. Although a growing plurality of new styles and materials has been available to modern and contemporary sculptors, the concept behind each piece has also been valued consistently and increasingly over the craft of making it. Because drawings provide access to originating ideas along with primary evidence of the artist's hand at work, they have become especially important. They are more and more considered as artworks in their own right as well, as traditional distinctions between art forms are blurred or erased by new technologies and attitudes.
One result of this emerging interest has been the intermixing of drawings with other kinds of works in museum and gallery installations and exhibitions. While this practice puts a larger number of drawings before the public, it may not increase their literal visibility much, since lighting must be kept very dim to protect works on paper. More scholarly and public interest in drawings has also resulted in a greater number of large-scale exhibitions devoted primarily or exclusively to them, such as the recent Between Transcendence and Brutality: American Sculptural Drawings of the 1940s and 1950s, which included one hundred thirty-nine drawings and eleven sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Dorothy Dehner, Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton, Isamu Noguchi, Theodore Roszak, and David Smith. The exhibition was organized by Douglas Dreishpoon, curator of the Tampa Museum of Art, who also wrote the catalogue. All of the works in the exhibition were culled from private sources, mainly from the artists (or their estates or foundations) and their dealers. This method of assembling an exhibition has the advantage of making the gathering of large numbers of works relatively easy; the disadvantage could be that those pieces do not represent the artist's best work from the period under review. Fortunately, all seven of these sculptors were deeply involved with a variety of different kinds of drawings, so that it was possible to get a reasonable idea of their concerns from the show. Because their concerns differed widely, the exhibition was more like a visual conversation in which a variety of topics was introduced rather than like seven people addressing the same issues.
Sculptors of the generation that was born early in the twentieth century shared a vocabulary drawn from elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Constructivism, but they used it to express their feelings and ideas about everything from politics to personal relationships, and their highly individualistic approaches are equally evident in their drawings. Bourgeois, the youngest of the seven, is represented by untitled ink drawings that evidence some of her main themes in the 1940s and 1950s: body parts mixed with architectural or landscape elements, repeated swag or bladelike shapes that are suspended or erect, and densely stroked forms that look like composite creatures made of hair and grass. Bourgeois was trained as a painter, and drawing offered her an important alternative to sculpture. For example, her 1947 Femme Maison, a drawing of a long-haired woman whose head and torso are a four-storied house, would have been hard to realize in the usual sculptural materials of that period, as would the draped shapes of Untitled (1949) and the hairy textures of Untitled (1950). Bourgeois's drawings question important issues--the nature of bodies and boundaries, the paradox of desires and domestic situations--that have been raised again decades later by younger but not bolder artists.
Dehner's drawings refer to sculptural possibilities even less than do those of Bourgeois. Dehner did not start making sculpture until 1955, and only four of her works in this exhibition were done after that date. Like Bourgeois, she was trained as a painter, and her delicate ink and watercolor or gouache compositions suggest an affinity with the understated aesthetic of Paul Klee. In pieces such as The Gift Tree and Personage (Male/Female) (both 1948), leaf, shell, and skeletal forms are encircled by lines that provide both visual emphasis and symbolic isolation. Other works, such as The Way #10 (1951), look like maps or diagrams of significant places in the heart or mind's eye: interconnected lines and shapes distilled by memory from emotion. But one drawing is very different from the others: Untitled (1957) consists of spiky black forms splattered and smeared with red wash in an explosive outpouring of feeling.
