Art
Luck of the draw
David Ekserdjian
Master Drawings and Watercolours in the British Museum (British Museum till 19 August) Renaissance Painting in Manuscripts (British Museum till 30 September)
The British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings houses 2.5 to 3 million sheets of paper. Sheer numbers, therefore, not to mention the fact that light is bad for drawings, make it impossible for the Print Room to display anything like all of its charms, but the current exhibition of over 200 works reveals both the variety and quality of its holdings. It is accompanied by a handsome picture book, which is in- tended to remain as a permanent anthology when the actual drawings are safely tucked up back in their boxes. The material is organised traditionally, by national schools and chronologically — with Spain, as ever, proving the odd man out. Only with the 20th century is this system abandoned, and everything lumped together. Ostensibly the selection of 'Modern Masters' is no less balanced, but in fact there is a bias in favour of Brits and German Expression- ists. Even a card-carrying Vorticist might raise an eyebrow on finding a good Wynd- ham Lewis but nothing by Picasso.
Artists are at their most thinking and at their most unthinking (as opposed to thoughtless) when they draw. Drawings are often used to study compositions and details of paintings, but they do also have a life of their own. A Leonardo first-idea for a lost or unexecuted Madonna and Child shows his speed of invention, as he tries out three different positions for the Vir- gin's head in rapid succession. A superb Barocci sheet is a confusion of disembo- died arms and legs, all studied from the life With specific ends in mind. Two magical tourers, contrariwise, are not preparatory for anything. The portrait of 'a grinning peasant woman met on his travels is a thumbnail sketch of genius, in which the intricacies of her headdress betray Dfirer's
obsessive love of pattern. The famous landscape 'Study of Water, Sky and Pine Trees' combines meticulous detail with a visionary, romantic quality. The scene is so dreamily real that it comes as a shock to realise that the drawing is unfinished.
Composition and figure studies, por- traits, and landscapes: these are to remain the fundamental categories throughout the exhibition. It invites us to compare and contrast great contemporaries but it is perhaps even more rewarding to follow themes down the centuries, and see how much and how little styles change. The drama of the Alps appealed to Bruegel and to Turner in their very different ways, the more tranquil Roman campagna to Anni- bale Carracci and Claude, but also to the late 18th-century English watercolourists. It is tempting to discern national prefer- ences too, and see David Wilkie, Sickert, and Henry Moore as sharing a taste for Rubensian female nudes that would not pass muster in the world of Page Three, where Watteau and Prud'hon's academic delicacy might well get by. Other sheets suggest correspondences unrelated to time or place. A watercolour of a dead grey partridge hanging from a hook, executed by Jacopo de' Barbari in 1511, could almost be by Oudry, while, even less predictably, two haunted Carthusian monks, captured in red chalk by Pontor- mo, have the same frightened eyes as the Duke of Wellington in Goya's portrait, also in red chalk. Both Pontormo and Goya made the paintings that followed less tortured.
It would be misleading, however, to imply that the show is predominantly didactic, and it is individual drawings rather than the lessons it teaches that make it so memorable. Among the supreme delights are a late Michelangelo Crucifi- xion, Rubens's portrait of his first wife, Isabella Brant, so alive it lacks only breath, and Rembrandt's baggy-trousered elephant; but not all the names are as famous. An inscription on one drawing states that it is a portrait of George Humphrey Jr, 'Drawn by James Gillray on the 1st July 1811, he being at that time Insane'. It more than holds its own in such illustrious company.
A visit to the drawings show is bound to be either a sprint or a marathon, but the exhibition of Renaissance manuscripts, also at the BM, is more manageable. Books of Hours take pride of place, needless to say, but even they are not exclusively religious. Often they include calendars illustrated with the occupations of the months (two such pages by Simon Bening are not inappropriately compared with Bruegel in the lavish and learned cata- logue), and the Garden of Love in a Netherlandish 'Roman de la Rose' reveals an equally fresh appreciation of nature. Even as seemingly unvisual material as Boethius proves inspiring: Jean Colombe portrays Lady Fortune in fashionable attire, her left, sinister, side jet black, her right, good, side gleaming white. Much of
the best work remains anonymous, although the exhibition does include minia- tures by such recognised artists as the sweetly pious Perugino and the eccentrical- ly classicist Aspertini. The greatest of these is Jean Fouquet, and the single page from his Hours of Etienne Chevalier suffices to place him on a level with the best Italians of the 15th century. In general, it is the Italians — as illuminators — who are least - fun, while the Netherlanders and especially the French are outstanding.
There are other pleasures too, notably in the way pages are composed, in the beauti- ful calligraphy, in the faultless trompe l'oeil of the borders, all of which have nothing to do with monumental painting. Most charming of all is a small volume, complete with its original case, of poems by a man called Pierre Sala, addressed to his beloved, Marguerite. He eventually married her, after her first husband had died, but Perreal's melancholy portrait of Sala doubtless dates from the time he was pining from afar. Even better than this im- pressive image are the naïve little illustra- tions of his verses, especially one of a man chopping down the tree that supports him, and about to fall into the water beneath.
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