DRAWING CONNECTIONS: Baselitz, Kelly, Penone, Rockburne and the Old Masters
The Morgan Library and Museum

Ellsworth Kelly Pine Branches II 1950 pencil on paper, 16-1/2 x 20-1/4 inches Private collection, Courtesy The Morgan Library & Museum	Jean-Antoine Watteau Study of a Young Man Seen from the Back and Another Study of His Right Arm, ca. 1717 black, red, and white chalk on light brown paper, 8-1/4 x 9 inches The Morgan Library & Museum Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene V. Thaw; 2000.56

Before there were tourists, artists were the prime justification for museums. Masterworks from the past were gathered to guide and inspire current practioners.  Delighting the hoi poloi was a secondary consideration. 

It is heartening, in this respect, to see an exhibition at the Morgan that investigates the linkage between four living draftsmen and old master drawings, and lets the artists loose in the vaults, so to speak, to pick out treasures.  Georg Baselitz, Ellsworth Kelly, Giuseppe Penone and Dorothea Rockburne have been invited to select masterworks from the Morgan’s incomporable collections to hang alongside examples of their own drawing.  The venture adds new spin to the addage, art for art’s sake.

At least, that is one way of looking at the arrival of living art in the hallowed halls of a museum steeped in a sense that greatness belongs to the past.  Critics of the Morgan’s new identity, its rebranding from plain old Morgan Library to Morgan Library and Museum, would argue that this expansion of remit is dictated by the expansion of plant: The Museum has its soaring, spanking white Renzo Piano Atrium, so its time for the art has to match its surroundings.

The exhibition is curated by Isabelle Dervaux, the first occupant of the position of curator of modern and contemporary art.  She has selected four very different artists not just in terms of the style and sensibility of their finished work but also in the ways that they use drawing, and relate to art of the past.  The artists were given a hand in the hang of their sections of the show in a way that makes the installations themselves quite significant in its own right.  All four are mostly showing resolved drawings that are self-contained works, whereas many of the drawing they in turn have selected are working sketches rather than showpieces.

Mr. Kelly, the first artist you encounter on entering the gallery, has placed his old masters choices along one wall at right angles to a longer wall of his own works.  The abstract painter is a consumate stylist whose every gesture is permeated with heightened consideration and refinement.  He has what seems an eclectic choice of drawings from Rubens to Matisse, and has chosen a spread of drawings from his own oeuvre.  But formally and conceptually, the implied pairings are as tight and spare as one of his shaped, minimal monochrome canvases.

His first drawing, attributed to Rubens, is of a sleeping lion, dated circa 1614-15.  Its facial features bear an uncanny resemblance, funnily enough, to Mr. Kelly’s own.  It echoes to a deathbed drawing of Mr. Kelly’s father among his own drawings, “Allan Kelly, Sr. (After Death)” (1982).

In his drawings (as in his photography) Mr. Kelly explores observation of nature and the environment that is eschewed from his pared-down abstract paintings.  The most familiar subject of his graphic works are plant forms, several of which are included here.  A delicate, intricate, almost seismographical cluster of lines that denote “Pine Brances II” (1950) form a relationship with Jean-Antoine Watteau’s “Study of a Young Man Seen from the Back” (ca. 1717). The Watteau manages to combine disparate speeds, quickly observed in the dash of red chalk that describes his breeches, meticulously rendered in his cluster of hair.  Mr. Kelly’s own drawing combines a similar fusion of ease and precision.  A careful yet unfussy “Study for ‘Curve I,’” (1973) relates in its casual care to Henri Matisse’s “Self-Portrait” (1945), which is part of the Morgan’s Thaw Collection.

Like Mr. Kelly, Mr. Penone has a penchant for the spare, quiet, and understated, but his work, and presentation, are very different. He organizes his selections in three groups with contrastive examples of his own work. Though varied, his drawing techniques are always labor intensive, as are most of his chosen old masters.  At the same time, the values of this artist associated with Arte Povera, the Italian minimal-conceptual group whose name derived from their preference for humble materials and techniques unassociated with traditional fine art, come across in his tastes and his own practice.  “Mountain Landscape with a River, Village and Castle” (ca.1525-1569) attributed to the Netherlandish master Pieter Bruegel, is modulated from painstakingly, intricate marks, as is the sturdy, steady “Portrait of the Artist’s Brother Endres” (ca. 1518) by Albrecht Dürer.  Both are placed in proximity to Mr. Penone’s own highly wrought if numbly illustrative “Study for 15-Year-Old Tree” (1970), an all-over composition is skewed perspective of planks of wood and a bare tree trunk. 

It is amusing that while the Italian Mr. Penone is drawn towards the expressive containment and strenuous work ethic of the northern tradition, the German Mr. Baselitz expressly rejected the “Gothic stiffness” of Dürer and the German School.  The grass is always greener on the other side of the Alps.  The German painter rose to international attention in the 1980s with bombastic, awkward, politically and emotionally loaded imagery in the neo-expressionist style.  A turning point in his early development occurred in 1964 during a six month period in Florence where he discovered the mannerists.  Making his selection long distance, from photographs, he responded to the fact that the Morgan boasts no less than 40 pages by the rare Florentine Parmigianino (Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola) he decided to select exclusively from this artist.

The juxtaposition of a work like Mr. Baselitz’s “A New Type” (1965) and Pamigianino’s “Man Standing Beside a Plinth on which he Rests a Book” (1530s) is a contrast in forms, if not intentions.  The German artist is self-consciously crude and ham-fisted, opting for an almost brutal flattening of the figure, a lack of differentiation between lines denoting foreground and background, and heavy, awkward outlines.  The Italian, on the other hand, was willing to sacrifice accuracy to fluidity, subjecting not just the figures but the space itself to a serpentine sensuality.  Where the mannerist and the neo-expressionist find common ground is in the sense that knowingly sick style conveys its own expressive value or meaning.  For Mr. Baselitz, revisiting the style cut short by National Socialism, that at the same time grew out of the same compost, so to speak, held a cathartic force in both personal and German renewal.

Where Messrs. Kelly, Penone and Baselitz relate their own work to old masters in terms, respectively, of form, process and style, Ms. Rockburne’s selection and self-presentation is based on what could be called a phenomenology of drawing.  Her own work has been very concerned with taking its cue from the material properties of paper what happens when the material is subjected to various procedures.  She has found drawings in the Morgan that underscore her thoughts about drawing in different moments of her career.

Like Mr. Penone, she gives us three case study of herself and her chosen masters.  Big minimal geometric drawings on shaped pages where the line follows folds of the paper, like “Conservation Class #5” (1973), keep company with a squared up Tintoretto of a man falling backwards in an open, indeterminate space – the sky, perhaps.  There is almost a sense of the space being defined by the act of drawing rather than, as would be normal, the other way around.  

In works reflecting her interests in astronomy, like the vibrantly colored “The Conjecture” (2007) drippy, but counterintuitively dense watercolor is used to impart a sense of bodies moving in different dimensions.  The corresponding old master drawings, like Domenico Beccafumi’s “Head of an Old Man with Open Mouth” (ca. 1529-35) also use the medium to suggest the weight and movement of the head turning in light.  And complex relief structures in different paper supports, like “The Plan of St. Gall” (1988-89) are placed with a study of interlocking hands by Guido Reni, to underscore the artist’s conviction that mannerist abuse of conventional space accounted for her burgeoning fascination with mathematics and astronomy.

Like her three contemporaries, Ms. Rockburne’s own pieces represent a shift, not just in scale, but in essential purpose from the small, exploratory, working drawings of the selected Old Masters.  Ironically, self-consciously conceptual modern artists seem less involved in raw visual thinking, in their works on paper, than the artists of the past. 

Inviting artists to showcase themselves in the company of past treasures is an inventive way both to probe the museum’s inventory and signal ways to add to it. But if the aim is to demonstrate continuity, the markedly different look and purpose of the contemporaries and the old masters suggests as much rupture as renewal within drawing.

Until January 6 (225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, 212 685 0008)

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