The National Gallery of Art is showing a sumptuous survey of the best works on paper it acquired during a three-year collecting spree. Between 2004 and 2007, the museum amassed 2,626 drawings, prints and illustrated books, compared to 778 photographs, 152 sculptures and 116 paintings.
The exhibition in the West Building covers the major movements in art history. “Medieval to Modern” ranges from a mid-1400s German engraving to “The End,” a 2006 drawing by Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha inspired by a movie’s final frame.
This smorgasbord of 209 works offers many treats in terms of artistic and technical advancements in drawing and printing. Its eight galleries of rarely exhibited works are not easily digested in one brief tour but demand close observation to be savored fully.
The first gallery alone is worth an entire visit. It displays some of the first known images printed in multiple colors: diagrams of celestial orbs in a 1485 book on solar and lunar eclipses. They follow a multihued page from a 1460s Bible, pressed from a single carved wood block before movable type became widespread.
Not all the works are so serious. One of most playful images in the show is an instructive etching of the dog paddle from a 1696 French manual on swimming.
Most of the prints don’t so much innovate in terms of technique but use tested methods in creative ways. In his 1656 image “Abraham Entertaining the Angels,” Dutch artist Rembrandt combines etching and drypoint techniques on imported Japanese paper to depict the figures in soft, slightly blurry lines like his paintings.
He and the Italian artists of his day were masters of the monotype, a technique invented in the mid-1600s that was revived in the late 1800s to create painterly effects. More spontaneous and improvisational than other printing methods, it requires painting ink onto glass or metal and transferring the resulting image onto paper through pressure. The monotype gets its name from the one strong impression made through the process.
Its blurry, atmospheric effects later turn up in an 1870s watery landscape by a French master of the medium, Ludovic-Napoleon Lepic. He created variations on his image by wiping ink off the plate in different strokes to convey changing weather and time of day. His student Edgar Degas took up the technique to capitalize further on its accidental effects. Unfortunately, the only Degas monotype in the show is “The Curtain,” which is highlighted in pastel.
In addition to reproduced imagery, the show evidences the direct hand of the artist in drawings. Chalk reappears as a favored medium, from Gaetano Gandolfi’s robust “Orpheus and Eurydice” to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s theatrical “Desdemona’s Death-Song.” British artist Richard Cosway used it to picture his daughter with his estranged wife Maria, who caught Thomas Jefferson’s eye while the future president was serving in Paris.
One of the few drawings entirely rendered in pastel is William Merritt Chase’s masterful 1888 “Study of Flesh Color and Gold.” Its female nude, her pale back turned toward the viewer, is dramatically juxtaposed against yellow floral wallpaper. Nearby, the creepy charcoal drawings by American symbolist Frederick Trap Friis picture a woman floating in a river with ghostly female spirits accented in white.
Highlights of the modern section include rare 1920s images, such as Russian constructivist drawings of kiosks advertising early communist propaganda. The remarkably well preserved 1923 “Merz” series by German dada artist Kurt Schwitters blends lithographs and collages to achieve geometric patterns in monochromatic colors. Schwitters kept this set of proofs for himself before it passed on to his heirs and was purchased by the museum in 2006.
Watercolors are particularly well represented in the show, from British artist Francis Danby’s rocky landscape to New Yorker Adolph Gottlieb’s abstract “Pictograph.” The earliest example is Albrecht Durer’s 1490s pastoral illustration in a book of “Idylls” by Greek poet Theocritus. One of the pictured shepherds is thought to be a self-portrait.
Variations on the watercolor also abound. A more opaque painting technique called gouache is applied to bright effect in Renaissance artist Giulio Clovio’s primary-colored “The Lamentation,” which is also highlighted in gold to heavenly effect. For the 1758 “The Card Game,” German artist Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki used aquatint, a process involving acid applied to a metal plate, to create tonal areas similar to a wash.
The most important watercolor recently added to the museum’s collection is by British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner. It was purchased at auction in July from a remarkable Turner collection put together by Baron Guy Ullens, a Belgian who made a fortune in the food industry. The 1840 mountain scene, called “Oberwesel,” previously appeared as part of the Turner retrospective held at the National Gallery in the fall.
Other 2007 acquisitions include the swirling 1914 collage “Solar Prism” by Sonia Delaunay and a 1940 dry-brushed abstraction by Paul Klee, who likened his modern hieroglyphics to “taking a line for a walk.” They were given to the museum by the Judith Rothschild Foundation.
More significant still are the 185 Italian and German drawings purchased last year from Wolfgang Ratjen, a Liechtenstein-based collector. The 66 Italian works date from the Renaissance to the end of the 18th century, including the Venice festival scene by Antonio Canaletto that starts the exhibit. Sadly, none of 119 German pieces, dating from 1580 to 1900, from this collection is represented in the current exhibit; they will go on view in May 2010.
WHAT: “Medieval to Modern: Recent Acquisitions of Drawings, Prints and Illustrated Books”
WHERE: National Gallery of Art, West Building, Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue Northwest
WHEN: Through Nov. 2; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday
ADMISSION: Free
PHONE: 202/737-4215
WEB SITE: www.nga.gov
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