The Rise of the Good-Enough

A Meditation on the Drawing as a Work of Art

by Brian Robert Hischier

Drawings In Dialogue: Old Master Through Modern

The Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection

The Art Institute of Chicago, June 3 to July 30, 2006

Curators: Suzanne McCullagh, Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searl,
Curator of Earlier Prints and Drawings

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, June 2007. Copyright © 2007 Brian Robert Hischier and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

Page I

Introduction

The exhibition here under review was the result of a Collector bestowing the contents of her collection upon a certain house of Art, wherein dwell curators and students and perhaps even a few artists. The exhibition, “Drawings in Dialogue: Old Master Through Modern” is intended to honor her gift, and as a monument to her, it is magnificent. The collector is Dorothy Braude Edinburg, and the recipient of her generosity is The Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition is composed of 166 drawings, selected out of the 250 drawings which will eventually compose the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition tells many fine anecdotes about the care, excitement and thrill with which Ms. Edinburg built her collection. For fifteen years she has been working with The Art Institute to perfect the collection, and the result is a delight to behold. It offers everyone a chance to look at some very fine drawings that otherwise would never be seen. This is good and this is bad.

The exhibition’s title is a quaint personifying metaphor: drawings in dialogue. One can imagine it opening a poem about two drawings hanging alone in a room, discussing their provenance, their futures, the fools and philosophers who have commented on their being, on what they might have been had their artists not died or fallen in love or gone mad and forgotten them. A poem would have been the perfect place for the trope, for it might have facilitated a new engagement with the concept—one that might inspire exploration into deeper, more interesting ideas. As the informing trope for an exhibition, though, it is slightly comical.

Postulating a dialogue between drawings is too simple. Modus Operandi: hang two drawings side by side, and out of sheer proximity they will strike up a[n ostensibly interesting] conversation. It’s a nice idea, but the result of such a pairing will more likely be an infection than a dialogue, for when a Person engages with two works of art, the one artwork will infect the other, and the two will become indelibly associated with one another in the Person’s mind. I doubt the curators of the exhibition under review would have even considered naming the exhibition “Drawings Infecting Each Other: Old Masters Through Modern,” rightly assuming that the public would misconstrue its subject as being about the sex lives of artists, thereby fostering disappointment with the actual subject matter.

So the drawings chat with each other, and we have to engage them within the metaphor of the exhibition title. The 166 drawings are paired up according to Borgesian similarities in subject, filtered through the spurious associative abilities of the individual curators involved. The stage lights are set low, gently illuminating each drawing and its description. The identification plates direct the Person reading it to the sister print so that the dialogue can commence with verve. This breeds a quiet excitement. “What will they say to each other?” the Person thinks to himself, staunching engagement. Unfortunately, there is only the illusion of potentiality when two drawings are said to be in dialogue with one another. Ultimately, this can only disappoint the aware or thrill the naive. Furthermore, “drawings in dialogue” is an interruptive trope, one that was intended to introduce a presence but has the effect of hindering a Person from engaging the artworks in front of him. The Person merely looks, listens, scratches his ear and moves on.

Perhaps the curators saw more promise in the exhibition’s title. Their own experiences as hosts may have been harbingers of its potential. At social gatherings, a host, when finding himself trapped with one guest for too long, will frantically attempt to facilitate a meeting between his guest and another who has similar, yet tenuous, interests, all that he may extricate himself from the conversation in order to attend to the proceedings of the night. As the two strangers converse, others may listen to them, and if the eavesdroppers are in the frame of mind to do so, they may critically examine the words of each speaker as if they were watching a televised debate. The dialogue takes its course, and, in order to be interesting to the listeners, ought to be about more than sports or the weather or how one bends one’s knees. It must have an agon, full of particulars and life. If two drawings are in dialogue with one another, one can assume that they are either complementing one another mercilessly, or they are examining one another on technique, subject matter, and strength of execution. At some point, one takes advantage of its superior rhetoric and begins to dominate the other. Or, the less vocal one may take the subtle tack and goad the other into making a fool of himself. Whatever the outcome, we spectators, we gallery-goers, we mus’um-lubbers expect a spectacle.

Drawings in Dialogue may be flawed in its basic conceit, but that doesn’t mean an internal artistic engagement can’t take place. Knowing that two artworks are side by side, the Person can willfully enter the engagement merely to see how chance works its magic on the so-called dialogue: for the Drawings, normally incapable of action, desire, sin or pleasure, will now misbehave. The Drawings mumble to one another in the buzzing stillness of the exhibition spaces. One Drawing is embarrassed by another’s technical prowess, feeling dumbed down and stiff and absolutely devoid of interest. One Drawing loathes the lack of color between its lines (which in isolation may not have been perceived as a lack), and grows to hate the watercolor swathes of its neighbor. One hastily drawn sketch wonders why its Artist was willing to send to it to a consignment house when its fragile strokes could barely bear the weight of its subject. Contempt, envy, ardor and ire are in the air, and as we break away from each pair, disoriented, we look for the next couple to entertain us.

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THE READYMADE IS OLDER THAN DUCHAMP

Through diligence and passion, Dorothy Baude Edinburg amassed a collection of drawings that will easily charge the mind of anyone that engages its contents. It spans the 14th to the 20th centuries and gives a stunning overview of the development of the drawing as a work of art, from the cartoon to the collectible and from the experiment to the statement. Many acknowledged greats are represented with individual specimens of their style. Others are nearly given a sub-exhibition of their own: Degas and Picasso each have eight drawings on display; Matisse has five. Only rarely do their drawings speak with one another in the terms of the exhibition.

The exhibition is ordered chronologically according to loose art-historical time frames: Renaissance to Romanticism (includes pieces by Giulio Romano, the Circle of Tintorretto, Carracci, Gainsborough, Prud’hon, Blake and Whistler), Realism to Symbolism (includes pieces by Manet, Gauguin, Seurat, Redon and a warren full of Impressionists), and finally, in telling seclusion, Modernism (includes pieces by Mondrian, Gris, Kandinsky, Grosz, Picasso and Matisse). Modernism alone occupies over a third of the exhibition space and its internal chronology is widely disrupted, presumably for the sake of conversation between the participants (Renoir and Picasso (cats. 103, 104) are from 1895/97 and c.1920 respectively, while the two Mondrians (cats. 105, 106) are from 1899 and 1940/41). Yet in terms of the history of drawing, “Modernism” occupies a relatively brief time span. An enormous diversity of artistic visions is present, and significantly the artist who will become the keystone for the construct of this essay is represented in the exhibition only by his portrait, and not by any of his works or theories: Marcel Duchamp, with his conspicuous absence of art, drawn by his brother Jacques Villon, in the final pairing of the show.

The divisions as they are defined, though, do not satisfy. Time and again we see ages of art separated in terms of movements or concerns. But as I walked through the rooms, it wasn’t movements and styles I saw so much as attempts and engagements with a subject. Underlying everything was the mystery of artistic intention and distraction. Drawings grouped together give one the unpleasant suspicion that much has been left unfinished in the world; and ironically, no matter how formally it is accomplished, matting and framing a drawing almost trivializes it. Placing all the drawings into notebooks for patrons to flip through would be impractical, but it would have seemed truer to the medium and its purposes. But I am disputing the indisputable: the drawings are mounted on the wall behind plates of glass and the three divisions are simple groupings, nothing more. Understanding this, I will reduce the divisions into two partitions of my own devising, which will better suit the theory here presented. The first of the two divisions is now called “The Rise and Fall of the Drawing,” and it lasts until the time of Duchamp’s objet trouvé. The second division will be called, “The Decay of the Drawing and the Rise of the Good Enough.” The point at which the one ends and the other begins is debatable, and not explicitly seen in the exhibition, but I claim it to be 1913, when Duchamp first exhibited his Bicycle Wheel. It would be a mistake to assume that Duchamp’s readymades were simply sounding the coming blasts of Modernism. Rather, they should be considered to be the culmination of a system of art creation that had been in place since the Middle Ages, with Marcel Duchamp as merely the extreme logical conclusion of their system of production.

The first 100 or so drawings in the exhibition detail quite clearly the dominance of the readymade until the 18th century, when for a short time it was interrupted by the rise of the Subject-Self, which of course quickly became yet another type of readymade.

The subjects in the art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were spiritually and humanistically utilitarian—they were the stuff of everyday psyches. They were stored for easy access in the Bible (or sermons), the Lives of the Saints, the works of the Ancients, the bestiaries, and elsewhere, offering plenty of opportunities for the artist to either reinforce their inherent mundanity or to infect the subject with his style and personality and ingenuity. It is evident from any historical overview that nearly all subject matter available for the artist was loosely codified, predestined, and all but executed for the artist (one could go so far as to argue that many details were likewise handled). According to the political, social and economic milieu of a particular time and place, the subjects would likely be of personal and societal interest to patron, public and artist alike. As with artists today, personal preference naturally influenced the selection of the subject, but only in so far as some subjects were avoided, while others were almost obsessively returned to according to the purpose of the piece, some being intimately important to either patron or artist. An artist showed no profound ingenuity in selecting his subjects and certainly showed no brilliance in titling them (if he bothered with such labels at all). Nearly all of their subjects were readymade, and the subject was merely the vehicle for a task of beauty or piety.

The style or personality (genius) of the artist was proved in his composition and in the selection of details. The care with which he attired the subject; the flora and fauna which surrounded or interacted with the subject; the expressiveness and variation in pose; the force of motion in the eyes or throughout the composition as a whole—this was where the artist applied his mind and his heart. If he was a master, his facility with the medium had been painstakingly developed prior to the act of thought. His skill was second nature to him. Naiveté and clumsiness would not interfere with the activities of his mind or dull his instincts with distraction. Likewise, years of practice had allowed the sketches and drawings to not only assist in the planning of a work, but to strengthen an otherwise plain idea before the artist ever reached the first stages of painting or sculpture. The High Renaissance was notorious for its obsession with humanistic perfection in form and content, whereby the artist could attain the highest recognition for his work. And if perfection was the goal, every influence upon the work would have been carefully considered and accommodated: the influence of technique, perception, development and execution. Each could be mastered by the devoted human mind if developed over enough time. If anything was lacking or distracting, the end result would be unacceptable. However, regardless of the execution and application, beneath all the exterior flourishes and styles were the readymade subjects owned collectively by all artists and patrons.

Lest I mislead, it was not only classically approved subjects that fit the “ready-made” description. Each society responded to subjects that informed it in whole or in part, according to particular factions and needs and desires. For one society, the classical subjects were the preferred subjects. For others, a pleasant landscape or a finely arranged still life was more important. In fact, landscapes and still lifes were the purest type of ready-made: the artist need only have a refined talent for selection and framing in order to begin his work.

During the Italian Renaissance, a silent challenge was issued to artists to test themselves against and furthermore to transcend the high aesthetic standards of classical antiquity. They were to create the most beautiful and perfect art. Mere execution was not enough for the artist who was inclined toward greatness. Attention to form and beauty was as important as the subject matter; technique could only abet the Truth as the artist saw it (the readymade is the most honest subject, if not always the most dignified).

It is good to consider these things when entering an exhibition that is about to give you a gentle overview of the history of drawing. Unprepared, the mind, which has been told that the drawings are living and in dialogue with one another, is likely to mistake the drawings as the work of contemporaries. Ridiculous as that sounds, criticizing a 500-year-old drawing using critical standards of today is a difficult mistake not to make, and doing so relegates the old drawing to the present. Then again, criticizing a 600-year-old drawing against the standards of a 500-year-old drawing is just as ridiculous.

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