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Indepth Arts News: "Under Cover: Artists' Sketchbooks" 2006-08-01 until 2006-10-22 Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Cambridge, MA, USA
The exhibition was organized by Miriam Stewart, Assistant Curator in
the Department of
Drawings. “It’s almost as if we’re catching the artist unaware,” said
Stewart. “In many cases,
these sketchbooks resemble a diary. One can follow the artists on their
travels or trace the
progression of an idea. While the sketchbooks range in date, their use has
remained surprisingly
Harvard University Art Museums—Under Cover: Artists’ Sketchbooks
unchanged. Artists from all eras have confided their travel sketches,
figure studies, and notes of
every kind to their sketchbooks.”
Designed to be easily portable, sketchbooks are often kept in artists’
pockets and many reflect
that in the permanent curvature of their covers. These distinctive
characteristics, along with the
nature of the drawings themselves, document an unusually personal view of
the artist at work.
The drawings and notes in these sketchbooks vary from nature and figure
studies, to travel
sketches, copies after old masters, expense accounts, and lists of
pictures. Some sketchbooks are
self-conscious and conceived as a whole, with every page signed, while
others are more
spontaneous and filled with a random assortment of hastily drawn sketches
and doodles.
Intact sketchbooks are uncommon, as over the years the majority of them
have been disbound
and sold as individual sheets. Many of the sketchbooks in the Fogg
collection may not be loaned
or made available for study due to their fragility. Under Cover: Artists’
Sketchbooks gives
visitors, students, and scholars an opportunity to see a selection of
these unique works that are
not often put on view.
“Sketchbooks have rarely been the sole subject of an exhibition, and ours
have never been
exhibited together,” said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot
Director of the
Harvard University Art Museums. “The Fogg has an important collection of
sketchbooks that has
been built over the past century, and we think audiences will find them
fascinating. Much time
has been devoted to the proper cataloguing and conservation of these works
that play such a
significant role in teaching, particularly in relation to artists’ working
methods and investigations
into artistic process.”
The exhibition comes on the heels of an extensive five-year cataloguing
project in the
Department of Drawings. Most of the sketchbooks in the Fogg collection
have been carefully
catalogued in the Harvard University Art Museums' collections management
database, including
detailed descriptions of every page and any relevant research on the role
of the sketchbook in the
artist’s career. Some of the larger sketchbooks have over 50 pages, and
others contain numerous
tangential items such as photos or notes, making the cataloguing process a
time-consuming but
important project.
IMAGE
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Under Cover: Artists' Sketchbooks, an exhibition of over 70 sketchbooks
and 45 drawings that were originally part of sketchbooks, will be on
display at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum from August 1 to October 22, 2006.
The exhibition will feature works from the Fogg collection of nearly 150
sketchbooks, ranging in date from the eighteenth century to the 1990s.
Intact sketchbooks from this remarkable collection will be displayed by
means of a single opening of each, including those by Jean-Honore
Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, Sanford Gifford, Edward Burne-Jones, John
Singer Sargent, Henri-Edmond Cross, Reginald Marsh, George Grosz, and
Christopher Wilmarth. Also on view will be drawings that were removed from
sketchbooks before they were acquired by the Fogg by artists such as John
Constable, Paul Cezanne, Henry Moore, and Brice Marden, as well as
sketchbooks and drawings on loan from Harvard's Houghton Library and
Museum of Comparative Zoology.
