Drawings exist in a nebulous realm within the world of art. They serve as intimate glimpses into the creative process and can be examples of great art in and of themselves. As most of us are taking our first class in art history, studying drawings provides us with the opportunity to see different stages in the artistic process.
In this installation, the class hopes to shed light on the contentious issue of what comprises a master drawing —what is the role of artistic celebrity? How can drawings with different functions be compared?
While we cannot provide definitive answers to these questions, we seek to explore aspects of this debate. We believe that every drawing here constitutes a master work. From simple sketches of inspiration to resplendent finished compositions, drawings capture the rawness of human emotion, expression and creativity. This installation showcases thirty drawings in the Princeton University Art Museum which span a diverse range of genres, time periods, and artists. From the finesse of the pen stroke to the splendor of colored washes, each of these drawings boasts qualities that transcend the ordinary and encapsulate the essence of what it takes to be considered a masterpiece.
Giles, Heather and Paul G. Haaga Jr. Known as graphite point - or "Spanish lead" after its main place of origin - this drawing medium attracted widespread popularity, although due to its soft consistency it was used mainly for preparatory sketches, rather than autonomous drawings. The graphite point duly spawned the lead pencil , following the discovery by Nicolas-Jacques of a manufacturing process similar to that used in the production of artificial chalk.
Cleaned and washed, graphite could henceforth be manufactured in almost any degree of hardness. The pencil hard points, with their durable, clear, thin strokes, were particularly suited to the purposes of Neoclassicist artists. Among the greatest exponents of pencil draftsmen was the academic painter J-A-D Ingres , who employed systematic pencil drawings as the basis for his oil paintings.
Numerous pencil drawing techniques emerged with time. Late 19th century painters, like Eugene Delacroix , favoured softer pencils in order to boost the depth and 3-D effect of certain areas within the drawing.
Georges Seurat fell back on graphite in his drawings At a European Concert , Museum of Modern Art, New York in which he translated his Pointillist technique into the monochrome medium of drawing. Pencil frottage rubbing made on paper which is then placed over a rough surface , first explored by the Surrealist artist Max Ernst , was another innovative technique.
Of the many ways of transferring liquid dyes onto a plane surface, two are particularly significant for art drawing: brush and pen. If the brush represents an altogether older method, dating from Paleolithic art , the pen has been the favourite writing and drawing implement ever since classical antiquity.
The functionality of the pen has remained almost unchanged for several millennia. The capillary effect of the split tip, applies the drawing fluid to the surface ground initially parchment, papyrus, vellum, but since the late Middle Ages, almost exclusively paper in varying amounts depending on the saturation of the pen and the pressure exerted by the drawing hand.
The oldest type of pen is the reed pen ; cut from papyrus plants, bamboo or sedge, it stores a reservoir of fluid in its hollow interior. Its stroke is typically powerful, hard, and occasionally forked as a result of stronger pressure being applied to the split tip. Rembrandt was an outstanding master of the strong, plastic accents of the reed pen, usually supplementing it with other pens or brushes.
During the 19th century, starting with the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, pure reed-pen drawings in an expressionist style have been created by several artists, including the Dadaist and satirical German expressionist George Grosz See also: Illustration Art. The quill pen offers an even wider range of artistic possibilities.
Ever since the late Middle Ages - the quill has been the most commonly used instrument for applying liquid dyes to the drawing surface.
The supple tip of the quill pen, available in varying strengths, allows a relatively wide scale of individual strokes - from soft, thin lines, such as those used in preparatory sketches for illustrations in illuminated books, to energetic, broad lines.
During the 20th century, metal pens emerged to replace quills, and are now made from high-grade steel and in different strengths. Inks are the most common form of liquid dye used in drawing. Gallnut ink was popular within monastic scriptoria during the medieval era of illuminated manuscripts. Another ink which became popular was bistre , an easily dissolved, light-to dark-brown transparent pigment obtained from the soot of the lampblack that coats wood-burning chimneys.
Its shade of colour varies according to its concentration and on the type of wood from which it is derived. Hardwoods like oak produce a darker shade than conifers, such as pine. During the pictorially oriented period of Baroque art , the warm tone that can be thinned at will made bistre a popular medium for pen drawings. Also obtained from a carbon source is India ink , derived from the soot of exceptionally hard woods, such as olive or grape vines, or from the fatty lampblack of the oil flame, with gum-arabic mixed in as a binding agent.
This thick black fluid preserves its dark tone for a long time and can be diluted with water until it becomes a light grey. Pressed into sticks or bars, it used to be sold under the name of Chinese ink or India ink. This drawing ink was favoured in particular by German and Dutch draftsmen because of its strong colour, which made it especially suitable for use on tinted paper.
Since the 19th century, India ink has been by far the most popular type of drawing ink for pen drawings, displacing all other alternatives in technical sketches. Other drawing fluids have included sepia , made from the pigment of the cuttlefish, minium red lead - used in particular for the decoration of initial letters and also in illustrated pen drawings. Alongside written manuscript texts, pen drawings are among the oldest artistic documents. Classical texts were illustrated with strong contours and sparse interior details; medieval marginal drawings and book illustrations were typically pre-sketched, if not actually executed, with the pen.
In book painting, styles emerged in which the brush was also employed in the manner of a pen drawing: for example, in the Reims School of Carolingian art , noted for its production of the 9th century Utrecht Psalter , and also in south Germany, where a separate illustrative genre using line drawings was closely associated with the Biblia Pauperum - low-cost biblical picture books used to instruct large numbers of people in the Christian faith.
The thin-lined outline sketch is also characteristic of the earliest autonomous drawings of the early Renaissance. In the 16th century, pen drawing reached its apogee. Leonardo was noted for the particularly precise stroke of his scientific drawings; Raphael produced more regular, graceful sketches, while Michelangelo drew with short strokes reminiscent of chisel work; Titian used intricate hatching to denote light and dark, while among the Northern Renaissance artists , Durer mastered all the possibilities of pen drawing, from a purely graphic, delineatory approach to a spatial and plastic modelling technique.
During the 17th century, pen drawing became less popular than other combined techniques such as wash a sweep or splash of colour applied with the brush. An open style of drawing whichmerely suggested contours, coupled with contrasting thin and powerful strokes, endowed the line itself with expressive qualities. In his drawings, Rembrandt in particular achieved a complete mastery of ink-and-wash drawing , exhibiting highly subtle 3-D effects through the use of different stroke layers obtained through a combination of various pens and brushes.
The thin-lined drawing method of the early Renaissance regained its popularity during the era of Neoclassical art and Romanticism during lateth and earlyth century. Both the Nazarenes and Romantics, for instance, achieved exceptional 3-D plastic effects by purely graphic means.
Another more pictorially oriented phase followed, culminating in the late 19th century work of artists like Aubrey Beardsley who applied the direct black-white contrast to planes, while in the 20th century the French masters Henri Matisse and Picasso reduced the object to a mere line without any depth or other spatial illusion.
Many illustrators, as well as cartoonists favour the clear pen stroke. Other 20th century innovators of pen drawing include the American oriental artist Mark Tobey who was famous for his 'white writing' style of calligraphic paintings; the German artist Wols Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze , noted for his hair-thin graphic seismograms; and Agnes Martin , noted for her delicate hand-drawn minimalist grids.
The brush is ideal for applying pigments to a flat surface painting but it has also been used in drawing since prehistoric times. In addition to the above-mentioned drawing inks - all of which have been used in conjunction with brush as well as pen - brush drawings have also been created with combinations of fluids.
One of the most common artistic techniques in use from Classical Greek art to the Baroque was Sinopia , the normal preliminary sketch for a monumental mural painting. Executed with a brush, it has all the characteristics of a preparatory drawing. In general however, few drawings were done exclusively with a brush, although it played a major role in landscapes, in which, by tinting of varying intensity, it offered a complete spectrum of spatial depth and strength of lighting.
The Venetians Vittore Carpaccio c. Some Dutch genre painters, like Adriaen Brouwer , Adriaen van Ostade , and Jan Steen used the brush to create a number of watercolour-style drawings.
During the 18th century, the brush drawings of Jean-Honore Fragonard and the Spaniard Francisco Goya raised the art to a new height, while in England artists like Alexander Cozens , John Constable , and J.
W, Turner , took advantage of brush drawing for their landscape studies. A popular combination is that of pen and brush, with the pen delineating the contours that denote the object and the brush providing spatial and colour values. The simplest combined application of this was manuscript illumination, where the shapes were drawn in pen and duly filled with colour, using the brush.
Other examples of brush-and-pen include the application of white pigment to drawings on tinted paper, the accenting of illumination how light falls on objects , and, of course, washes. The method of combined pen and-brush drawing was especially popular with the draftsmen of Germany and the Netherlands, especially in the circle around Durer and the south German Danube School.
Drawing Aids Mechanical aids are generally much less important for art drawing than for other art forms. Those that have been employed include the ruler, triangle, and compass, especially in constructionist and perspectivist works of early and High Renaissance vintage.
The graticulate frame was used to assist in the creation of correct perspective, while mirrors with reducing convex mirrors or concave lenses were also used especially in the 17th and 18th centuries as drawing aids as was the camera obscura.
See Art Photography Glossary. True-to-scale reductions or enlargements can be made with the aid of a tracing instrument known as a pantograph. More specialist tasks could be accomplished with the aid of elliptic compasses, curved rulers, and stencils. By far the largest number of art drawings in the Western world deal with the human figure.
Portraits Portrait drawings typically involve the pure profile and the three-quarter profile. Examples include 15th-century portraits by Pisanello or Jan van Eyck, as well as Durer's drawing of the emperor Maximilian. The works of Jean and Francois Clouet in France and of Hans Holbein the Younger in Switzerland and later in England, bestowed a special autonomy on portrait drawing, especially when completed in chalk of various colours.
More drawn to the psychological aspects of portrait art , late 19th- and 20th-century portraitists favoured the softer crayons that more readily reflected their artistic impulses.
Leon Bakst , the famous set and costume designer for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes , was another superb draftsman. Landscapes By the 15th century, landscape, too, had also become an acceptable subject for a stand-alone drawing, as indicated by Jacopo Belllini's 15th-century sketchbooks.
However, not until the advent of Durer at the end of the century was landscape fully respected as a theme of its own without reference to other works. His drawings of his two Italian journeys, of the region of Nuremberg, and of his journey to the Netherlands, represent the earliest pure landscape drawings.
Centuries were to pass before such "pure landscape" drawings occurred again. Landscape elements also appeared in 16th century German and Dutch drawings and illustrations, notably those by members of the Danube School like Albrecht Altdorfer and Wolf Huber. The Netherlandish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder also drew topographical views as well as free landscape compositions, in both cases as independent works.
In the 17th century, the landscape drawings of the Accademia degli Incamminati those of Domenichino , for instance mixed classical and mythological themes with heroic landscapes. In 18th-century Italy, the topographically-exact landscape drawing attained a highpoint with the advent of the Vedutisti, the "view-painters", like the Venetians Canaletto and Bernardo Bellotto , and the Roman Giambattista Piranesi Landscape drawings reached a second flowering in England during the early 19th century thanks to works by JMW Turner and Alexander Cozens, while in France the tradition was exemplified by Camille Corot and, later, Van Gogh.
Figurative Genre Works Of far less importance to autonomous drawing than portraiture and landscape, figure drawings are typically closely connected with what was happening to painting in general. Thus for example drawings of genre scenes were relatively prevalent during the 17th century Dutch Realism School, in 18th-century France and England, and in 19th century France Honore Daumier. Still Lifes Still life drawings, notably the representations of flowers, like those of the Amsterdam artist Jan van Huysum , have been popular ever since the 17th century.
In some of these works the similarity to painting is very close; take for example the pastels of the 19th century French artist Odilon Redon , or the work of the 20th-century German Expressionist Emil Nolde , both of which cross the dividing line between drawing and painting.
Fantasy Drawings Drawings depicting imaginary, surreal or visionary themes, such as the fantastic compositions of Hieronymus Bosch , have long been popular.
Graphite media includes pencils, powder or compressed sticks. Each one creates a range of values depending on the hardness or softness inherent in the material. Hard graphite tones range from light to dark gray, while softer graphite allows a range from light gray to nearly black. Gaston Lachiase, Standing Nude with Drapery, Graphite and ink on paper. Honolulu Academy of Arts.
Charcoal , perhaps the oldest form of drawing media, is made by simply charring wooden sticks or small branches, called vine charcoal, but is also available in a mechanically compressed form. Vine charcoal comes in three densities: soft, medium and hard, each one handling a little different than the other. Soft charcoals give a more velvety feel to a drawing.
Compressed charcoals give deeper blacks than vine charcoal, but are more difficult to manipulate once they are applied to paper. Left: vine charcoal sticks. Right: compressed charcoal squares. Vine Charcoal examples, via Wikipedia Commons. Charcoal drawings can range in value from light grays to rich, velvety blacks. Pastels are essentially colored chalks usually compressed into stick form for better handling.
They are characterized by soft, subtle changes in tone or color. Pastel pigments allow for a resonant quality that is more difficult to obtain with graphite or charcoal. More recent developments in dry media are oil pastels , pigment mixed with an organic oil binder that deliver a heavier mark and lend themselves to more graphic and vibrant results.
The drawings of Beverly Buchanan reflect this. Her work celebrates rural life of the south centered in the forms of old houses and shacks. The buildings stir memories and provide a sense of place, and are usually surrounded by people, flowers and bright landscapes. She also creates sculptures of the shacks, giving them an identity beyond their physical presence. Because wet media is manipulated much like paint — through thinning and the use of a brush — it blurs the line between drawing and painting.
Ink can be applied with a stick for linear effects and by brush to cover large areas with tone.
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