I only briefly studied in art school—just long enough to get the gist of how one puts together an academic painting. It is an ordinal and layered process, in which drawing (before one even mixes paint) plays the most important role. Sketches on paper act as a testing ground to get the composition right—where the artist tinkers with the orientation and layout of every form, as well as their relative sizing and proportioning. Next the artist determines the value-composition, the division of lightness and darkness, based on the forms. Only then comes color, and, really only incidentally, gesture in mark making.
One of the strictest instructors I had, a guy obsessed with anatomy, would interrupt students in the middle of painting to point to a random bone on the class skeleton and ask what it was called. One day, when the models were on break, he told us a story about how his sixteen-year-old son, thinking it would infuriate his father, goaded him into visiting the Pollock-Krasner House, a museum where Jackson Pollock had a studio. Hoping to turn his son’s trap back around on him, he agreed to take him there. In under one hour at the house, having driven two and a half to get there, his son, unable to maintain the bit and forced to acknowledge the tree from which he had fallen, gave up in a burst: All right, it’s terrible! He doesn’t know how to paint! They returned home, the father victorious, having preserved the honor of the academy.
It is ironic that the best painters in history, even by the lights of the academy, never followed the rules. They let personality triumph over pedantry. Like the horseshoe shape of politics, the opposite poles in art eventually wrap around to meet each other. Leo Steinberg, a modernist art critic and historian of the Renaissance, once said that Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine-paintings (artworks about as modernist as they come) had the balance and rigor of Giotto, a master of the Italian Renaissance. But even Giotto is historically significant because he broke away from the rigidity of Byzantine forms in favor of more lively compositions and emotional expression.
The two exhibitions of drawings on display at the Morgan Library, plucked from the collections of the Eveillard family and Clement C Moore, demonstrate the modernism present in the classical masters. They’re not the best drawings in the world, but it’s a treat any time we can get close to the hand of Rembrandt or Rubens. Like over-planning a vacation, by the end of all the sketching and forethought that goes into an “academic” painting, the initial idea can be beaten to death. But the very first drawings that go into planning, made while the artists are still tickled by their muses, have a pep in their sketch. In Jan Van Eyck’s sketch of two hands, the fingers have minds of their own. They spring from the palm in harmony like birds in V-formation. A little drawing by Rembrandt of a top-hatted man hunched over with a cane indicates weight with rough thick lines and a swoop to his spine from thin jagged swipes.
If you removed the eyes or a handful of identifying features, these drawings might as well be abstract sketches by Jackson Pollock. And they would hold up just as well (or not, depending on how you were raised). Francis Bacon claimed that he only painted his horrifying studies of the old masters because it gave him an excuse to use bold colors that everyday life simply didn’t provide. Maybe the old masters felt the same way. In a sketch by Rubens, preparing for his painting the Arrest of Samson, it feels as though Samson is being sucked into a tornado and the bodies of other figures swirl into the shape of serpents. If he had used a larger brush and didn’t bother with the detailing, it could have been a Franz Kline. Undergirding every great painting by an old master is a modernist sketch replete with expressive gesture and psychologically transparent mark-making. This modernist bent becomes apparent with some degree of digging in the paintings themselves. But it is immediately obvious when looking at the masters’ scratches on scraps of paper they thought no one would ever see.
Thank you for reading, and thank you to my editor Emma Schneider :)