Vivante Drawings

If we were collecting drawings centuries ago, at least in Italy, we would probably have assembled our drawings as Padre Sebastiano Resta (1653 – 1714) had–using albums and writing pertinent information right by the drawings. A major drawback of keeping drawings in albums, or laid down on mounts,  is that a good many drawings are double-sided and by pasting drawings down, you lose one side. (Discovering that you have another drawing on the verso of a laid down drawing is similar to the thrill of discovering that there are two layers to the chocolate box.)

Padre Sebastiano Resta | Libro d'Arabeschi | Album of Drawings | Biblioteca Comunale | Palermo

Most people now keep their drawings in mats and information is stored apart. FileMaker Pro and Access are two databases that can be used for storing this type of information. Since I’m always worried about losing information, whether by corrupted programs or computer failure, it would be wonderful if one could use Google docs to keep all the information together, both fields and images. This would  be useful for accessing information from computers at libraries and anywhere. Once I finish this post, I’m going to write to suggest the idea to Google.

The following is a list of possible fields for catalog entries or fact sheets.

• Creation Place
• School
• Century
  
• Artist’s Name
• Birth Place
  
• Birth Date
• Death Date
  
• Death Place
  
• Image Recto
• Title Recto
• Date of Work
  
• Media Recto
• Insciption Recto
• Image Verso
• Title Verso
• Date of Work
  
• Media Verso
• Inscription Verso
• Carrier/Drawing Support
• Size in Millimeters/Inches
• Watermark Image
  
• Watermark Reference
• Inventory Number
  
• Acquired from
• Date
• Price
• Provenance
• Lugt Image
• Lugt Number
• Exhibitions
  
• Bibliography – Real
• Bibliography – Related
• Notes/Correspondence

The French win. Of the three websites on my bookmarks toolbar for researching drawings, two are French: Joconde and the Louvre. The other is the British Museum. I return to these again and again. You’d think that America, the land of computing and the World Wide Web, would have magnificent, complete resources, but no.  German electronic resources are also uneven.

The legacy of Diderot and the state structure of French museums have made their research websites remarkably strong.

The Louvre has 140,000 drawings online. For results, each page delivers 5 entries, mostly with thumbnail images that are sufficiently readable (unlike the BM, where the thumbnails are a bit small). If there are too many results, say for Stefano della Bella (there are 688 results or 138 pages) and it becomes laborious going through them all,  I then switch to Joconde which gives 100 results per page, and includes the Louvre and other state collections. The Louvre’s images are richer, so I weave back, via inventory number (listed under oeuvres),  to view the better images.

• Louvre Search

• Joconde Search

The British Museum’s database is also close to heavenly. Results include prints which can be good, but also overwhelming.

• British Museum Search

Between 1984 and 1986, I worked as curator for Ian Woodner’s collection, and what I remember most about him was how he cooed at drawings, especially the most recently acquired and the ones he was about to buy. It was visceral, you’d see him start, move closer to the sheet, and then coo.

Woodner was a tall man, had good skin color from being in the sun, and had attractive white hair, sometimes quite long. He wore double-breasted suits with twin back vents, colorful suspenders, and occasionally fuchsia pocket squares. A little more eccentric was his use of eyeliner at night and the very strong tuberose and gardenia perfume called Fracas. He was handsome, even in his 80s.

He grew up in Minnesota, studied architecture at the University of Minnesota, and then Harvard. However, he was much more a real estate developer than an architect. I never remember his sketching out building plans or praising any particular architect, never mentioned White or Wright, and never bought any old master architectural drawings for his collection. A couple of times when we were out on the New York streets, I remember his saying how much he liked skyscrapers because of the reflections of sky and clouds in the glass. His buildings, mostly rental apartment buildings, were never very high or full of glass, they were maybe a bit ordinary, but there were many of them, and they paid for his collecting.

By 1984, when I went to work for him, he’d been collecting for some thirty years. He was born in 1903 and died in 1990. Much of his collection had been bought from the Schab Gallery on 57th Street. Frederick Schab had sold him his star Benvenuto Cellini drawing of a Satyr, many other good drawings, and also many lesser works. I felt lucky in that Konrad Oberhuber had recently come on the scene, advising Woodner on acquisitions, and involving his students in writing the catalog entries for the Woodner shows at the National Gallery in Washington, the Getty, and the Kimbell. (Oberhuber was a remarkable teacher and Harvard professor, who later went on to become the Director of the Albertina in Vienna. Many people had no idea they were interested in drawings until they’d met him.) The notoriety Woodner was receiving through the exhibitions, propelled him to buy more drawings. It seemed that every week, and sometimes every day, dealers and auction house representatives would come to his office hoping to interest him in a drawing.

Woodner’s collection was very broad, he didn’t take the more conventional and modest path taken by many collectors, that of concentrating on just one school, say French 18th century drawings. Instead he had drawings from all over Europe, from the 14th century forward. He had a taste for wonderfully awkward drawings. His early drawings, his Germans and Goyas and Redons were most interesting because of their standing outside of our usual sense of beauty.

Probably the artist he most admired was Odilon Redon and he had a large collection of Redon drawings, prints, pastels, paintings and watercolors. His own pastels and watercolors, mostly of flowers or landscapes, were strongly influenced by Redon. Here in Italy, they call vibrant colors “accesi” meaning turned-on or electrified, and that’s a way of describing Woodner colors. His garden on Long Island, where he painted on the weekends, had beds of seriously bright flowers and a peacock house.

He had a preference for large drawings, but also had many small sheets. The display of drawings was very important to him. He liked being involved in the matting of the drawings and always wanted the windows larger and played with the back color of the mats, hoping to make the drawings appear bigger. He had an excellent relationship with his daughter Andrea, or Andy, and she came to the office every week. She had a very easy way of explaining things, and this is when I learned to add and subtract fractions for mats.

Once, an important visitor was coming, maybe a museum director, but I can’t remember who it was. When prominent visitors came, works would be transported to his apartment from Morgan Manhattan, a storage company, and invariably the frames would be dinged and show ugly white nicks from the trip across town. After we’d hung the transported works, Woodner suddenly had the idea of using instant coffee and water to inpaint the white gesso areas and so we set to work and he joked, “Even if they don’t look good, the smell is wonderful.”

He’d drift away if anyone started talking about iconography. He was much more interested in how a drawing was made, made from the artist’s viewpoint. Woodner had, as so many successful men are allowed to have, a bad temper. It was generally around the real estate people that he’d let go–turn bright red and fulminate. He’d also become furious with Walter Strauss, the not very successful publisher of the Illustrated Bartsch and a kind of fixer for Woodner (the Lubomirski and Koenigs drawings were procured by Strauss). Visiting curators would sometimes witness his anger and combativeness if they expressed any doubts about his Hans Holbein the Younger portrait (now in the National Gallery and inventoried as after Holbein) or a Crucifixion he was certain was by Dirk Bouts (also National Gallery, and now given to the Master of the Coburg Roundels). He would get angry if other people weren’t seeing what he was seeing. While this seemed strange to me at the time, now it doesn’t. Those interested in old masters can get very exercised about attribution questions.

Woodner wasn’t particularly keen on seeing other people’s drawings, or visiting public collections and going through boxes. He was focused on what was his and what he could get. He kept a small library, apart from the larger office library, in a studio next to his apartment in the west 60s. Since he had trouble sleeping, he liked to look at exhibition catalogs and find drawings that were owned privately and see if anything could be done to shake them loose. He also loved looking through sale catalogs, whether old or new.

There was something very stable and reassuring about working at Woodner’s offices. The real estate people were genuinely kind and amusingly puzzled by these expensive pieces of paper called drawings for which they’d create stretch payment schedules. The place, with its plastic wood furniture, was strangely pleasing. It was endearing to see Woodner with Paula Vial, his business partner, having lunch together. Woodner with his burnt grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch (also burnt toast for breakfast) and always thinking towards the next acquisition.

Blown sheet glass had been made from the 11th century forward, first in Germany, famously at Chartres (windows are of the early 13th century) and with Venice as the center of all glass by the 13th century.  In the late 17th century in France an important innovation in 2D glass was the pouring of glass onto iron casting tables.  Bernard Perrot (1619 – 1709) pioneered this method of casting and rolling glass which resulted in large and uniform sheets of glass, strong enough to be used in carriages and transparent enough for the greater production of mirrors (Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors dates from 1678-84). It is also in the 17th century that works of drawings and other art works began to be glazed.

By the 18th century, paintings showing cracked and broken glass panes covering works on paper, became popular subjects for trompe l’oeil artists.

Anon. Dutch | Engraved Portrait of Peter Lely with Broken Glass | Oil on Canvas |18th century | Sotheby's Amsterdam 17 XII 2007, lot 120

Laurent Dabos | Print of Tsar Alexander I and Other Works on Paper | Oil on Canvas | Early 19th c. | Sotheby's London (Olympia) 25 IV 2006, lot 429

Glass protects art works from dust and insects alighting, but exposes art works to destructive ultraviolet rays. Nowadays, plexiglass, the type developed specifically to block UV rays, is used for glazing. However, pastel drawings, are still framed with glass because the static charge of plastic can lift the pastel powder away from the paper. When glazed pastel drawings are transported, the glass must be carefully taped so that if the glass breaks it won’t gouge the artwork.

The best way of seeing a drawing is without glass or plexiglass. In the trompe l’oeil paintings above, the glass color was probably enhanced to help the visual deception, still, the difference between the glazed and unglazed sections is very telling.  Even today’s near flawless glazing materials create a barrier to seeing and understanding.

Flax Plant (Linum Usitatissimum), Univ. della Tuscia Botanical Garden, Viterbo

The flax plant, or linum usitatissimum, is a key plant for the fine arts: linen rags to produce paper, linen canvas for paintings, and linseed oil as a medium for oil paints.

Flax was one of the first plants to be cultivated and easily adapts to different climates. (Archaeologists have recently found dyed wild flax fibers in Georgia that are about 34,000 years old. Here is NYT link.) Russia is now the largest producer of flax. Other countries with favorable cool climates where flax grows well are Belgium (known for the finest linen and artists’ canvas), France, the Netherlands, and Ireland. But, Egypt and Italy also produce linen and have for thousands of years. Turin’s Egyptian Museum has many beautifully preserved lengths of linen as well as the linen wraps of mummies.

Ancient Linen at Torino's Museo Egizio

The longest Etruscan text, the Liber Linteus Zagrabensis, is also the only example of an ancient linen codex. It dates to 250 BC and although Etruscan has not been deciphered, it seems the book is a liturgical calendar.  It’s thought that it was made near Chiusi, in Etruria, and from there somehow traveled to Egypt. It survived as mummy wrappings and has been reconstructed to its original form, an accordion folded codex. Both the codex and the mummy are in Zagreb’s archaeological museum.

Linen, the textile, as well as the paper made from linen rags, is exceptionally strong, very supple, and folds remarkably well. Although supple, it retains its shape, being inelastic. It has the ability to absorb water and still feel dry.   These characteristics, at least partly, explain why centuries old drawings can be so well preserved.

US banknotes are made from linen and cotton rags. Their lifespan, about 20 abuse-filled months (it’s estimated that a dollar bill can be folded 4,000 times before tearing), is a good deal longer than that of other currencies. Linen becomes stronger in water than when dry, and bills accidentally left in pockets launder perfectly.

Flax grows thigh high and has pretty blue to almost white flowers with five petals.  The plant reaches maturity in about 100 days. In Italy, it is planted in the early spring and harvested in June. In colder climates, it’s planted later. Egypt’s warmer climate would make flax a winter crop.

Flax in Flower (Linum Usitatissimum) at the Univ. della Tuscia's Botanical Garden, Viterbo

Once mature, the whole plant, with the roots, is lifted from the ground. The process in readying the fiber for weaving is very involved and it is hard to imagine that for millennia nearly all families grew flax, retted it, scutched it, spun it, wove it, and then created garments. By the Middle Ages, Viterbo, a city in Northern Lazio, had a thriving flax industry.  The area’s thermal springs originally attracted the Etruscans, and the Romans built elaborate baths there. Bullicame, the name of the springs and shallow pools closest to the city, those where prostitutes bathed according to Dante, were also used to rett or macerate flax stems. Retting frees the fibers from the woody center of the stem. The heat of the water accelerated the retting process.

Bullicame's 55°C Water Was Used to Rett Flax

Where water is unavailable, flax is allowed to rett in the field, the dew and rain act to release the fibers, just more slowly. After this the flax is allowed to dry and then it is scutched, or beaten. In the process the precious flax strands are separated from the tow, the shorter fibers.  I realized how right the terms “tow-headed” and “flaxen-haired”  were when I saw this photograph of Egyptian flax in the ad of an Egyptian online flax merchant.

Advanced Group Ad for Egyptian Flax