KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
Every year, the American members of the International Art Critics'
Association nominate their favorite shows of the past twelve months,
dividing them into "best in a museum," "in a gallery," "by an emerging
artist," and so on. (I'm occasionally tempted to suggest "most pretentious,"
"overrated," "overhyped," or "irritating," and I've often wished there was
a slot for "most underrated" or "surprising.") Among the past season's
contenders for 1999's "best show in a museum" was
New York Collects:
Drawings and lM:!tercolors, 1900-1950,
the Morgan Library's summer blend of
familiar and unfamiliar treasures. Memorable from previous museum and
gallery exhibits were a textbook 1912 Braque collage and a couple of
impeccable Matisses: a fragmented, near-Cubist reclining nude in charcoal
from 1938 and a slightly earlier, voluptuous pen and ink of the artist draw–
ing his model. It was a pleasure to see them again, just as it was to
re-encounter some of the stellar works from the Thaw Collection-for
starters, a pair of ravishing late Cezanne watercolors, an exemplary 1914
Picasso collage, and a nervous 1943 Pollock ink drawing-last seen here
several years ago when the Morgan celebrated the Thaws' munificent gift
of their superb drawings to the library. Other less well-known but no less
pleasurable works ranged from a vigorous Kandinsky brush and ink
abstraction to a palpitating Mondrian church facade, from a Marin seascape
scribbled in pencil to a crisp Sheeler interior in subtly modulated conte
crayon. For charm, it was hard to beat a vivid Bonnard sketch of an inte–
rior with a dachshund, while for muscularity, first place went to a richly
worked David Smith study for one of his most ambitious sculptures of
1950.
It's a tribute to the wide-ranging, demanding taste of New York col–
lectors that the show presented a reasonably coherent account of modern
drawing (in the broadest sense) during the first fifty years of this century
in Europe and the U.S., and did so with generally superlative examples.
Such standouts as Picasso's vigorous 1907 watercolor study for
Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon,
or Braque's staccato 1918 drawing of a fruit dish and
newspaper in brown ink and his tiny, seductive 1921 gouache of musical
instruments, sheet music, and grapes, were alone almost worth the trip to
the Morgan. And more: fine Legers; a wealth of German drawings, includ–
ing a confrontational Corinth and some tough Beckmanns; works by the
