Mantegna to Matisse: omnium gatherum or collection of collections?

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Master Drawings from the Courtauld Gallery

Edited by Colin B.Bailey and Stephanie Buck

In a recent review a well-known critic has called the Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition ‘Master Drawings from Mantegna to Matisse’, an ‘omnium gatherum’. He complains that this ‘gathering of unrelated, single drawings’ does not teach or instruct the viewer about drawing techniques and he would have preferred  a more didactic approach by giving comparisons and offering documentary material  to the viewer.  At the end of a long (and rather sour) review he laments the state of drawing today.  In art schools, he says, ‘Drawing used to…lie at the heart of painting and sculpture; it is no longer so…[for] most of its techniques and purposes…have been abandoned...’.

 If he had bought the catalogue he would have seen his desire for comparative material fulfilled in the form of full scholarly entries about each work including notes on the text and bibliographic material for further research.  The catalogue is a ‘must-have’ and it has been written and produced with considerable care.  Indeed, we have come to expect nothing less of this leading institution teaching history of art.  For an exhibition of this kind, which is shown in London and will travel to the Frick Museum in New York, it is nearly obligatory to support the material with a fine and thorough catalogue.

In her introductory acknowledgements, the curator of drawings at the Courtauld Gallery, Stephanie Buck, describes the logistics involved in facilitating ‘systematic study and inspection of every sheet’  and enabling and encouraging 20 different scholars  to provide fresh  insights about the drawings in their catalogue entries. All the curatorial files had to be newly opened and reassessed, conservation experts consulted and  provenances checked  and  checked again. 

Ms Buck’s own main contribution to the catalogue is a long essay, ‘Mastery on Paper’ which explains the history of the collection as a whole and concludes with a little discussion about what is meant by the term ‘mastery’ in drawing. Cennino Cennini’s idea of mastery was, quite simply, ’the artful interpretation of nature’ while Vasari uses the term disegno (design) as ‘something that is a visible expression…of our inner conception’.  But it is Diderot who gives drawing its heart and soul when  he asks

Why does a beautiful sketch accord greater pleasure than a beautiful painting?  Because it has more life and fewer forms...Perhaps we find sketches so attractive only because, being somewhat indeterminate, they allow more liberty to our imagination, which sees in them whatever it likes…

What we call the Courtauld Drawings Collection is really’ a collection of collections’.  It is a university art collection meant to be used in teaching and research but also to be seen by a wider public.  The three co-founders of the Courtauld Institute, Viscount Lee of Fareham, Samuel Courtauld and Sir Robert Witt each left substantial and complementary collections to the Gallery.  These were joined by the Princes Gate Collection in 1978 and by other, subsequent gifts and bequests. The spirit of philanthropy is still alive: there was a recent gift of British watercolours that included nine sheets by Turner. 

The collection is now a single entity encompassing ‘most national schools and periods’ and numbering about 7,000 works of art. It has certain strengths:  there are wonderful Italian examples (15th–18th century), Dutch, Flemish, Spanish and British drawings of the 18th and 19th centuries and French of the 18th–20th centuries. But  it still lacks substantial examples of American  draughtsmen and could strengthen its German and contemporary holdings.  Nonetheless, as the curator is careful to add, the collection continues to grow and develop.

For the exhibition the organizers chose 59 works in a variety of mediums.  First are the Italian drawings in pen and brown ink, with added washes and sometimes chalks.  A splendid Tiepolo (No.3) showing the Madonna and Child with St Joseph off to the side reading, shows a single, liquid wash bringing the line drawing to life.  We learn that the sculptor Canova was an avid collector of Tiepolo drawings of this kind and that his pupils pasted the drawings into notebooks for a supply of themes or poses for their sculpture.

The cover of the catalogue shows a Pontormo drawing (No.11) in black chalk called ‘Seated Youth’ c.1520.  Here the catalogue entry is particularly detailed: many similar drawings have been found, none of them directly related to any finished work.  The boy leans or crouches on the stone steps, his left hand tight as a fist in front of his mouth, a gesture which has been taken to indicate an attitude of ‘ fear and worry’.  A similar pose in a work by Raphael leads the writer to note other borrowings of expressions and gestures between artists of the period.  Finally, the notes carefully explain the very damaged condition of the work, with its extensive folds and tears and splashes of paint. One is reminded of the labours of the conservation department while preparing works for exhibition.

Skipping lightly (!) over master drawings by Rembrandt (2), Goya, Daumier, Turner (2) and others, we come to a very long (506 cm) panorama by Francis Towne, The Forest of Radnor of 1830 (No.42).  It is a broad, featureless landscape, vast and bleak with a road disappearing behind a hill.  The washes are applied directly over the graphite marks giving a special clarity and, using a restricted palette, the artist delicately modulates the tone to give light and shadow.  The drawing is in fine condition too, largely because it was kept in a sketchbook, unaffected by light, until it was purchased by the donor in the 1960s.

The Cézanne watercolour Apples, Bottle and Chairback of 1904–06 (No. 57) is often reproduced and was shown four years ago in ‘The Courtauld Cézannes’, an exhibition that included all the works by the artist in the Courtauld collection.  At the time this watercolour was scrutinized and photographed in detail using the very latest laboratory techniques in order to trace the artist’s mark making. The writer of the present catalogue speaks of Cézanne’s ‘compelling sense of assurance in his placement of the compositional elements’. For instance, the chairback acts as a frame for the flowered wallpaper behind, the bottle provides a vertical with the horizontal of the table top.  A network of these relationships unifies and stabilizes the composition.

We note the very free  drawing, sometimes in repeated or interrupted lines, sometimes no doubt rubbed out,  which are then interleaved with the liquid veils of colour, each of them ‘modulated’ and  adjusted to establish a visual ‘rightness’ both on the paper surface and in apparent depth..  Examining this work so carefully explains a lot about Cézanne’s working procedure.  He never stops looking at the motif, nor is he tempted or deflected from his task by something known or remembered.  The work teaches us more about a way of handling  the medium than a host of textbooks ; in the catalogue there are comparative illustrations to show other uses  of the same motif and a double-page spread  (ever so slightly cropped). We can agree with the writer here that , ‘…the viewer becomes aware that the deeper meaning of still-life is being conveyed in a new way….’

Master Drawings from the Courtauld Gallery, edited by Colin B.Bailey and Stephanie Buck is published by the Courtauld Gallery and the Frick Collection, with Paul Holberton Publishing, London, 2012. £30.00. ISBN 978 907372 38 4 pbk.