Between Transcendence and Brutality: American Sculptural Drawings from the 1940s and 1950s. - book reviews

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.

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.

Even more colorful and painterly than Dehner's are the ink, gouache, and wash drawings by Herbert Ferber. A sculptor with a degree in dentistry, Ferber also made paintings that he exhibited independently of his three-dimensional pieces. While a few of his drawings, such as Un-titled (1947), are carefully shaded visions of abstract sculptures, there are also figural studies, including the composite Portrait of a Sensualist (1947), and color compositions such as Untitled (1958), which featured red and yellow shapes against a pale-green background. The small color drawings are among the richest and most lyrical works in the exhibition; by comparison, the three small bronze sculptures by Ferber that were also included seem far less inventive and free.

While many of Ferber's drawings function independently of sculpture, almost none of Seymour Lipton's do. His ink, pencil, and Conte crayon studies are meticulous renderings of projected three-dimensional pieces, often including a horizon line and indications of a base. He drew certain sculptures repeatedly, imagining how they would look from different angles and altering the shapes and relationships of elements within them. Although individual works are tight and dry, variations such as the two drawings titled Study for "Sorcerer" (about 1950) give interesting access to the artist's working-out of a particular sculpture. As the exhibition also featured four Lipton metal sculptures, Sorcerer among them, the close connection between his two- and three-dimensional activities was amply demonstrated.

Like Lipton, Isamu Noguchi was a "sculptor's sculptor" who used drawing primarily as a means to sculptural ends. Unlike Lipton's worked-up studies, however, Noguchi's pencil drawings are more like sketches or doodles: numerous realized and unrealized images of elements or pieces are often juxtaposed on a single sheet, such as Fifteen Studies for Sculpture (1947). When I catalogued these drawings for the Noguchi Foundation, I was amazed both by the volume of ideas he generated, particularly during the 1940s, and by the small percentage of those ideas that were actualized in three dimensions. The fragility of his favorite materials during that period--thin slabs of slate and marble rather than welded metal--certainly made it more important to refine forms on paper before making irreversible cuts in the stone. Noguchi also developed drawings from which he could create maquettes directly; on the graph paper of a Worksheet for Sculpture (1945) he sketched elements of slab constructions that were then cut out, mounted on cardboard, and used to make small models of pieces that could be scaled up into stone. By means of this process, Noguchi effected a logical and literal translation of two dimensions into three. When the worksheets were backed later with black paper, the cutout spaces emerged as bold calligraphic shapes that are appealing in their own right.

Noguchi used drawing to investigate specific sculptural possibilities rather than to lead him in radically new directions. For Theodore Roszak, on the other hand, it was a series of gouache drawings that helped precipitate a mid-1940s move from machinelike constructions to welded metal structures. Like Bourgeois, Dehner, and Smith, Roszak was a painter before turning to sculpture in the 1930s, and drawing remained one of his primary modes of expression. Like Lipton and Noguchi, he made numerous studies related to particular pieces, but unlike theirs his drawings are neither dry nor tentative, but bristle with energy and a sense of organic growth. Study for "Spectre of Kitty Hawk" (1945) is a ferocious hybrid of animal and vegetable parts, while Study for "Thorn Blossom" (1947) suggests postnuclear crosspollenization run amok. Four small steel sculptures by Roszak, for three of which there are studies in the show, were also included and, as with the Ferber pieces, they are somehow less impressive than the drawings. And one of the most powerful Roszaks is Nova (1950), which is not a study for a sculpture but a tangle of spiky forms exploding from the center of the sheet.

By comparison, David Smith's drawings--done in inks, tempera, or spray paint--fill their spaces evenly and calmly. While the collection of forms in Study for "Tanktotems" (1953) is as calligraphic as the cutouts in Noguchi's worksheets, Smith did not translate these elements into a multipart maquette, but into a welded metal silhouette that was almost as two-dimensional as the drawing. Smith, who turned to sculpture from painting in the 1930s, tried to make sculpture more like drawing, not the other way around. If a three-dimensional object approaches a drawing, in space, then the tangible and the intangible become more interchangeable, as indeed has happened with much recent sculpture. Subjects such as landscape, which were once the province of two-dimensional works, can be realized in three dimensions, and the freedom of gesture found in pieces such as Untitled (1952) can be sustained in metal. The dematerialization of the figure that this process implies can be seen in Study for "Personage from Stove City" (1946); the body is reduced to a set of straight and curving lines.

For all these sculptors, as Douglas Dreishpoon notes in his catalogue essay, the figure was a major issue; none of them abandoned it definitively, but they envisioned new kinds of composite or nonsomatic bodies that could provide fresh directions for sculptural experiments. As they rethought the figure, they explored and questioned male and female roles, images, and sexuality. Another issue was that of space: interior and exterior reflected each other, so that the destruction and reordering of the 1940s and 1950s were mirrored in personal odysseys and restructurings. The crucial conduit between inside and outside was the artist's hand at work. This generation of sculptors fused the vocabulary of European modernism with the moral imperative of carve-direct, so that the gesture was doubly important to them as a response to experience and as a record of activity. Wrestling with metal, stone, or wood, they found that matter matters; the power and freedom of the moving hand could not always be captured in three dimensions. For Lipton and Noguchi, drawing became part of the plan for maximizing the expressiveness of their sculptures by carefully envisioning and re-envisioning each piece, as did Lipton, or by perfecting elements in sketches and making cutout models from them, as did Noguchi. For others, such as Roszak and Ferber, drawing sometimes functioned in direct relation to specific pieces, but also was considered important in and of itself, as a vehicle for Roszak's explosive energies or as an outlet for Ferber's painterly interest in color. For the other three--Bourgeois, Dehner, and Smith--drawing was a primary mode of expression toward which their sculptural experiments were gradually directed, rather than the other way around, particularly in the works of Smith.

By presenting us with such a wide range of approaches to drawing within a group of sculptors that shared many concerns, this exhibition provided a fuller understanding of the complex relationships between drawing and sculpture. The exhibition catalogue offered short essays on each artist, as well as individual chronologies and selected bibliographies, but even more important was the opportunity to see more than twenty drawings by each of the seven artists, so that the breadth and depth of their individual ways of working on paper could be analyzed and compared. Drawings are increasingly seen as primary documents of the creative process; the exhibition offered a welcome chance to examine that idea as reflected in a variety of works by seven leading American sculptors.

NANCY GROVE is author of Isamu Noguchi: A Study of the Sculpture and Magical Mixtures: Marisol Portrait Sculpture. She teaches at Parsons School of Design.

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