MANTEGNA TO MATISSE:
MASTER DRAWINGS FROM THE COURTAULD GALLERY
The
Courtauld Gallery, London,
14 June to 9 September 2012
The Courtauld Gallery
holds one of the most important collections of drawings in Britain. Organised in collaboration
with The Frick Collection in New York,
this exhibition presents a magnificent selection of some sixty of its finest
works. It offers a rare opportunity to consider the art of drawing in the
hands of its greatest masters, including Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo,
Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Cézanne and Matisse. The Courtauld last displayed
a comparable selection of its masterpieces more than twenty years ago and this
exhibition will bring the collection to new audiences nationally and
internationally.
The exhibition opens
with a group of works dating from the 15th century, from both
Northern and Southern Europe. An
exquisite and extremely rare early Netherlandish drawing of a seated female
saint from around 1475-85 is rooted in late medieval workshop traditions. It
was also at this time that drawing assumed a new central role in nourishing
individual creativity, exemplified by two rapid pen and ink sketches by
Leonardo da Vinci. These remarkably free and exploratory sketches show
the artist experimenting with the dynamic twisting pose of a female figure for
a painting of Mary Magdalene. For Renaissance artists such as Leonardo,
drawing or disegno was the
fundamental basis of all the arts: the expression not just of manual
dexterity but of the artist’s mind and intellect.
These ideas about the
nature of drawing achieved their full expression in the flowering of
draughtsmanship in the 16th century. At the heart of this
section of the exhibition is Michelangelo’s magisterial The Dream. Created in 1533, this highly
complex allegory was made by Michelangelo as a gift for a close friend and it
was one of the earliest drawings to be produced as an independent work of art.
More typically, drawings were made in preparation for other works,
including paintings, sculptures and prints. Pieter Bruegel the
Elder’s engaging scene of drunken peasants cavorting at a festival in the
Flemish village
of Hoboken was drawn in
1559 in preparation for a print. Whereas Michelangelo sought ideal
divinely inspired beauty in the human figure, Bruegel here revels in the
disorder of everyday life.
Despite the important
preparatory function of drawing, many of the most appealing works in the
exhibition were unplanned and resulted from artists reaching for their
sketchbooks to capture a scene for their own pleasure –
Parmigianino’s Seated woman asleep
is a wonderful example of such an informal study surviving from the early 16th
century. Drawn approximately 100 years later in around 1625,
Guercino’s Child seen from behind
retains the remarkable freshness and immediacy of momentary observation.
Guercino was a compulsive and brilliantly gifted draughtsman. Here
the red chalk lends itself perfectly to the play of light on the soft flesh of
the child sheltering in its mother’s lap. No less appealing in its
informality is Rembrandt’s spontaneous and affectionate sketch of his
wife, Saskia, sitting in bed cradling one of her children. The exhibition
offers a striking contrast between this modest domestic image and Peter Paul Rubens’s
contemporaneous depiction of his own wife, the beautiful young Helena Fourment.
Celebrated as one of the great drawings of the 17th century,
this unusually large work shows the richly dressed Helena – who was then
about 17 – moving aside her veil to look directly at the viewer.
Created with a dazzling combination of red, black and white chalks, this
drawing was made as an independent work of art and was not intended for sale or
public display. In its imposing presence, mesmerising skill and subtle
characterisation, it is the equal of any painted portrait.
The central role of
drawing in artistic training is underlined in a remarkable sheet by Charles
Joseph Natoire from 1746. It shows the artist, seated in the left
foreground, instructing students during a life class at the prestigious
Académie royale in Paris.
Drawing after the life model and antique sculpture was considered
essential in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of
the great champions of this academic tradition was Jean Auguste Dominique
Ingres. The beautiful elongated forms of the reclining nude in his Study for the ‘Grand Odalisque’,
1813-14, represents the highest refinement of a precise yet expressive linear
drawing style rooted in the academy. Outside the academy, drawing could
offer the artist a means of liberating creativity. Goya’s Cantar y bailar (Singing and dancing), 1819-20, comes from one of the
private drawing albums which the artist used to inhabit the world of his dreams
and imagination.
Canaletto’s
expansive and meticulously composed View
from Somerset Gardens,
looking towards London
Bridge is one
of several highlights of a section exploring the relationship between drawing
and the landscape. This group stretches back as early as Fra
Bartolomeo’s Sweep of a river with
fishermen drawn in around 1505-09, and also includes a particularly
strong selection of landscapes from the golden age of the British watercolour.
The interest in landscape is nowhere more powerfully combined with the
expressive possibilities of watercolour than in the work of J.M.W. Turner.
His late Dawn after the Wreck
of around 1841 was immortalised by the critic John Ruskin, who imagined the
solitary dog shown howling on a deserted beach to be mourning its owner, lost
at sea. For Ruskin, this was one of Turner’s ‘saddest and
most tender works’.
The Courtauld
collection includes an outstanding selection of drawings and watercolours by
the great French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists for whom the
Gallery is most famous. Apples, Bottle
and Chairback is one of Cézanne’s finest late works in any
technique. Here we see the artist pushing watercolour to its extreme
through his extraordinary intuitive but masterful handling of successive layers
of coloured washes over luminous white paper. Another highlight of this
group is the equally remarkable large crayon drawing by Cézanne’s younger
contemporary, Georges Seurat. His standing female nude materialises in an
almost unfathomable manner from an intricate web of curving crayon lines.
The exhibition concludes with work by the two greatest artists of the 20th
century, Picasso and Matisse, who reinvented the art of drawing for the modern
age.
The Courtauld’s
drawings collection is largely the result of a series of remarkable individual
gifts. They include the drawings presented by Samuel Courtauld alongside
his collection of French Impressionist paintings, the bequest by Sir Robert
Witt of some 3,000 drawings in 1952, and Count Antoine Seilern’s Princes
Gate bequest which, in 1978, brought many of the most famous individual
drawings into the collection. Additionally, the works in the exhibition
reveal rich and intriguing earlier collecting histories in which artist
collectors such as Peter Lely in the 17th century and Thomas
Lawrence and Joshua Reynolds in the 18th century feature alongside
some of the great princely and connoisseurial collectors of Europe.
Mantegna
to Matisse: Master Drawings from The Courtauld Gallery is organised under the auspices of the IMAF Centre
for Drawings which was established in 2010 to support the study, conservation
and public enjoyment of The Courtauld’s collection. The catalogue
accompanying the exhibition has been prepared in collaboration with The Frick
Collection and features twenty authors contributing entries on individual works
in their specialist areas, often with new technical research undertaken at The
Courtauld. Spanning some 500 years, Mantegna
to Matisse offers an opportunity to study and enjoy a remarkable
array of masterpieces. The exhibition also aims to celebrate the great
versatility and diversity of draughtsmanship and invites audiences to consider
what makes a master drawing.
For
further information and images, please contact:
Sue
Bond Public Relations
Tel. +44 (0)1359
271085, Fax. +44 (0)1359
271934
E-mail. info@suebond.co.uk, www.suebond.co.uk