drawing: October 2007

Friday, October 26, 2007

exhibition news

Georges Seurat: The Drawings
October 28, 2007–January 7, 2008

The International Council of
The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery,
sixth floor

The Museum of Modern Art
(212) 708-9400
11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues

Museum Hours:
Saturday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Sunday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Monday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Tuesday closed
Wednesday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Thursday 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Friday 10:30 a.m.–8:00 p.m.

Once described as "the most beautiful painter's drawings in existence," Georges Seurat's mysterious and luminous works on paper played a crucial role in his short, vibrant career. This comprehensive exhibition—the first in almost twenty-five years to focus exclusively on Seurat's drawings—will present over 135 works, primarily the artist's incomparable conté drawings along with a small selection of oil sketches and paintings. Surveying the artist's entire oeuvre, from his academic training through the emergence and elaboration of his unique methods to the studies made for his monumental canvases (such as the renowned A Sunday on La Grande Jatte), the exhibition will also present important new research on his artistic strategies and materials. In bridging description and evocation, Seurat masses tones to abstract figures, weaves skeins of conté crayon to test the limits of decipherable space, and engages with the Parisian metropolis, illuminating urban types, revealing the ever-expanding industrial suburbs, and offering a tour through the world of nineteenth-century popular entertainment. Most of all, his dramatization of the relationship between light and shadow resulted in a distinct body of work. Though Seurat is perhaps best known as the inventor of pointillism, this exhibition will demonstrate his tremendous achievement as a draftsman and the significance of his working methods and themes for the art of the twentieth century.

Color!

Charles Schultz

William Blake

Adolph Wolfli

notebook drawing by John Clapp showing how the eye processes color

antique map

Drawing of Rivendell by author J.R.R. Tolkien

Saul Steinberg

drawing by William Blake for his poem "the Tyger"

Chris Ware

"Fun" money by J.S. Boggs

David Hockney

illuminated medieval manuscript

Thursday, October 11, 2007

drawing exhibits to go and see!

Joan Linder
Mixed GreensChelsea
531 West 26th Street,
212-331-8888
October 11 - November 10, 2007
Opening: Thursday, October 11, 6 - 8PM

Mixed Greens is thrilled to present Joan Linder's most ambitious show to date. In this exhibition, she will exhibit two amazing projects: a fifty foot ballpoint pen drawing of The Pink
(a neighborhood bar in Buffalo, NY) and a series of evocative drawings detailing the sexual exploits and everyday life of a rabbit.

Mark Sheinkman
Von Lintel GalleryChelsea
555 West 25th Street,
212-242-0599October 11 - November 24, 2007
Opening: Thursday, October 11, 6 - 8PM
Critic Michael Amy best sums up Sheinkman's latest endeavor in the exhibition's catalog "Sheinkman now explores volume, transition, change, velocity and ephemerality, in ways he was not previously prepared to do...Mark Sheinkman's selective historical outlook provides him with the tools that are required to persuasively proclaim the ongoing relevance of abstract painting."

PAUL NOBLE: dot to dot
Friday, September 21 – Saturday, October 27, 2007

GAGOSIAN GALLERY
555 WEST 21ST STREET
NEW YORK NY 10011
T. 212.741.1111
F. 212.741.9611

Forging a unique and maverick path in the ebullient British art scene, Noble received widespread international recognition for his vast and monumental drawing project, Nobson Newtown. Drawing image after image, story after story-- at once architect and town planner, archaeologist and cartographer, social historian and activist, creator and destroyer—over the course of a decade Noble invented and described a melancholy urban vision somewhere between Le Doux’s revolutionary utopias, Sim City, and the post-holocaust wastelands pictured in the daily media. Nobson Newtown was Noble’s own fantasist master plan of a symbolic city, isometrically rendered and replete with all manner of nightmares, perversions, scatolological and libidinous excesses. A blocky, geometric font (also invented by the artist) structured many of the buildings themselves, providing yet another layer of meaning in this fascinating parody of contemporary society and the dreams of social engineers.

and, right here at Columbia!

Arthur Rackham: Drawings from the Berol Collection

Chang Octagon, RBML, Butler 6th Floor East

August 20 through October 26, 2007

This small exhibition celebrates the 140th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Rackham (September 19, 1867). It also celebrates the recent rehousing of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s entire Rackham Collection by the Columbia University Libraries’ Conservation Department, allowing for safe storage as well as easy display. The collection, including more than 400 original drawings, 5 oil paintings, and 30 sketchbooks, was formed and donated to the Library by Dr. and Mrs. Alfred C. Berol in 1967 in honor of the centennial of Rackham’s birth. The gift complemented their earlier donation of a virtually complete collection of Rackham’s published books. Dating from childhood drawings to watercolors made for his posthumously published edition of The Wind in the Willows (1940), the Berols’ gifts document Rackham’s entire artistic life