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PAKTISAN KEVIEW
stroked planar drawings in pencil, many enriched by later additions of
color. For all the individuality of Lawrence's work, whether in color or
black and whi te, its sharp-edged, simplified forms and uninflected expans–
es announce his connections with an American tradition of socially
conscious art - think older artists such as Ben Shahn or Robert
Gwathmey, with whom Lawrence shared political and social concerns, as
well as formal ones - but that is part of its charm. The syncopated rhythms
of Lawrence's drawings add warmth and energy to his proletarian motifs,
while in his more engage images, stylization simply intensifies the anger
and pride implicit in his African-American themes.
Among the past season's greatest pleasures was the splendidly chosen
survey of Matisse's drawings at C and M Arts, from rare Fauvist images of
1906 to bold brush and ink "paintings" of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
That a Matisse drawing show was full of marvelous works is not news–
worthy; what was remarkable (and impressive) was the mix of first- rate
near-iconic drawings and unfamiliar ones of equal or even higher quality.
Witness those Fauvist drawings:
Seated Woman,
1906, a nude rendered with
a few swift strokes of a broad, ink- dipped brush, the angular arabesque of
her limbs and torso contrasted with the dense zig-zag patterns of floor,
wallpaper and upholstery, and
Tile Idol,
from the same year, a ravishing
half-length standing nude in pen and ink, the fullness of her body sug–
gested only by eloquent contours, tellingly doubled at crucial junctures,
and setting suggested only by the placement of the figure . Both are fine
drawings and exemplary of their period, but while
Seated Woman
is a
deservedly celebrated, textbook image,
The Idol
is almost unknown.
Similarly, the exhibition's pen and ink drawings of the model in the
studio presented one of Matisse's standard themes with distinctly non–
standard, perfectly wonderful examples. The most spectacular was a
reclining nude on a patterned couch with a mirror in the background and,
at the lower right of the sheet, Matisse at work, his presence declared by
his hands, gripping drawing board and pen, in the act of creating the image
before us, the self-referential drawing of the drawing included. It's an
extraordinary, layered image, apparently spontaneous and deeply consid–
ered, witty and grave, a paradigm not only of incisive line, inventive touch,
and irreproachable placement, but of complicated issues about perception,
illusion, and the relation of the artist as what Michael Fried calls "first
beholder" to his work. The charcoal drawings, with their shifting, search–
ing contours, were equally notable, from a study for the famous 1925
canvas of a straight-backed nude, folded against Persian patterns, now in
the Beaubourg, to an unfamiliar 1939 drawing of a woman reading in
which the masses of body, chair, and table are simultaneously invoked as
dense, architectural solids and dematerialized as strokes and smudges of
