"Drawing is Another Kind of Language"
Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection
April 20 - June 10, 2001

The exhibition "Drawing is another kind of language": Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection comprises over one hundred drawings by 49 modern and contemporary artists—the first presentation from a collection widely considered to be among the most important of its kind in the United States. Among the artists represented will be Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, John Cage, Eva Hesse, David Jeffrey, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Sharon Louden, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Carole Seborovski, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Sara Sosnowy, Richard Tuttle and Cy Twombly.

Each of the works included in the exhibition probes two basic material facts of drawing, the mark and the surface. At the same time, each one animates those facts with a strong impulse, a distinctive touch. Although it may be without gesture, and sometimes even without line, each artist makes his or her own mark.

Gesture is the traditional hallmark of drawing, the handwriting that guarantees the intimacy of the aesthetic encounter. In the late 1940s, artists like Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline brought that tradition to a peak, making their art from personal, even heroic marks. In reaction, other artists like Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt sought to keep the evidence of the artist’s hand and wrist to a minimum, while still insisting that drawing was central to their art. It is their alternative spirit that inspires the collection presented in the exhibition.

"Drawing is another kind of language" (the title is a quote by artist Richard Serra) includes the work of minimalists and post-minimalists, conceptual and installation artists, painters and sculptors and draftsmen. What seems to unite them is the question: How to replace gesture in the language of drawing? As visitors to the exhibition will see, a variety of answers are posed. Some artists replace gesture with unusual procedures. In his Location series, Sol LeWitt (b. 1928), methodically pursued the crazy idea of making drawings that included their own written instructions. This is seen in his drawing entitled The Location of Geometric Figures: A Blue Square, Red Circle, Yellow Triangle and Black Parallelogram (1976).

Other artists in the exhibition interrupt the flow of drawing by using masking tape, collage, and unusual drawing tools. In her diary, Eva Hesse (1936–1970) described the making of Untitled (Vertical Abstraction) (1960) with a "crudely shaped wrong side of a small brush." In his Untitled (Mirror) (1952), Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) used oil, solvent transfer, watercolor, crayon, pencil and collage. Using the solvent, he rubbed magazine and newspaper images onto paper, reversing them in the process.

Many artists in the exhibition turn to the grid, that master figure of modernism, but subvert its controlling precision. In Carol Seborovski’s (b. 1960) Ink Dot and Enameled Line Drawing (1988), a grid underpins more freely applied media. Placed on top, collaged strips attempt to contain the layers of mixed graphite and pastel below. Elena del Rivero’s (b. 1952) Letter to The Mother (1995), made with thread and typing on paper, is one of 300 cryptic letters that switch the gender of Franz Kafka’s "Letter to Father". Cross-stitching evokes overtyped letters; her sewn grid upbraids the minimalist penchant for macho materials.

The sculptors in the exhibition, such as Richard Serra (b. 1939), tend to take drawing into the laboratory of the drafting table or else up to the Olympian heights of sculptural equivalency. When Serra says "drawing is another kind of language," the emphasis is on another. For Serra, drawing is a language of doing and making. This explains why his sculptures are rarely preceded by drawings. That would make the drawing a projection, a mental object. Rather, most of his drawings, he says, "are the result of trying to assess and define what surprises me in a sculpture." One of Serra’s drawings to be exhibited, Forged Rounds I (1993), was made following the installation of Two Forged Rounds for Buster Keaton (1991), a sculpture consisting of two fat steel cylinders about five and a half feet tall. In the drawing, Serra focuses on the edge and shape of a cylinder, evoking the distortions produced by walking around it, which he calls "peripatetic vision."

The paintings of Jasper Johns (b. 1930), like the sculptures of Serra, are also rarely preceded by drawings. Johns prefers to draw from or after his paintings, engaging in pragmatic reuse or skeptical revision. He explains, "A finished painting usually seems to have a clear image, and using it as a subject of drawings may be a form of economics, a way of dealing with the absence of a larger idea. Or one might say that is a way of bypassing ideas in order to concentrate on the activity of making." Johns’s 1956 drawing Tango refers to a painting of the same name from 1955. In the painting, a protruding key connected to a real music box draws the viewer close to its brushy blue surface. The drawing’s tangle of lines achieves the same result.

Younger artists in the exhibition turn drawing on its head, rejecting the old hierarchy of mark and surface to take their inspiration from the paper itself. David Jeffrey (b. 1956) pushes the modernist focus on materials to the breaking point in his Untitled (1995), made with wax, charcoal and rust. His intensive marking, folding, and tearing produces effects of decorative patterning and organic decay—taboos of modernist abstraction.

The presentation of "Drawing is another kind of language" at The Contemporary Museum is the last stop on a world tour that has taken the exhibition to Winterthur, Switzerland; Ahlen and Berlin, Germany; Vienna, Austria; Amiens, France; Southampton, New York and Chicago, Illinois. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with essays by Dieter Schwarz, director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur and a specialist in contemporary American art, and by Christian Schneegass, professor of art at the Berlin Akademie der Künste, and extensive catalogue entries by Pamela Lee, assistant professor of modern art at Stanford University, and Christine Mehring, a Ph.D. candidate in modern art at Harvard University. ($40 softcover).

"Drawing is another kind of language": Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection was organized at the Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts by James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot director, and Harry Cooper, the Fogg Art Museum, associate curator of modern art. The exhibition and the catalogue were funded, in part, by grants from Christie’s, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Fifth Floor Foundation. The presentation of the exhibition in Honolulu is supported in part by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the ASTON Waikiki Beachside Hotel.