KAREN WILKIN
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that the hundred or so superb works on view-some familiar treasures,
others utterly surprising-represent only about a quarter of the Mor–
gan's holdings in this area. The show (which includes exemplary works
by artists both before and after Bruegel and Rubens, including a newly
acquired and spectacular Rembrandt landscape) examines the increasing
importance of drawing on paper to the preparation of paintings, prints,
tapestries, and the like, for Flemish and Netherlandish artists in the fif–
teenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Along the way, it demon–
strates not only the evolution of drawing languages, but of methods and
techniques, from meticulous pen drawings to spontaneous pencil stud–
ies and uninhibited ink washes. What is perhaps most exciting to modern–
day viewers, it also allows you to see how these artists used drawing as
a way of discovering their world. Alongside the marvelous studies for
altarpieces, allegories, genre scenes, and portraits are informal drawings
of astonishing immediacy recording the fall of drapery or a stretch of
woodland or a member of the artist's family. There are Rubenses and
Van Dycks like graphs of thought processes-rapid sketches that make
ideas visible, probe poses and gestures, test compositional alternatives.
Throughout, the show offers testimony to a Northern taste for the
irregular, the complex, and the clearly defined, even among the Flemings
and Netherlanders who went to Italy or looked hard at Italian art.
While the exhibition is full of wonderful things, the large number of
landscape drawings, whether done from observation or invented, are
particularly engaging, perhaps because they seem so direct or because in
paintings, the wide panoramic, symbolic landscapes for which Northern
artists were famous serve mainly as backgrounds. A splendid Pieter
Bruegel the Elder landscape drawing provides an intimate view into the
origins of his celebrated paintings of the seasons.
Several artists are represented in depth. Virtually all aspects of Hen–
drick Goltzius's activity are represented-portraits, mythological sub–
jects, preparation for an engraving (a wonderful head in which line
embraces and creates volumetric form, rather than outlining it), and more.
Rubens is treated to a mini-retrospective that includes fascinating evidence
of the works he studied during his years in Italy and how he transformed
them; it's particularly illuminating to watch him westle Raphael into sub–
mission in a drawing after a fresco in the Farnesina. Van Dyck and
de Gheyn, among others, are similarly represented by groups of remark–
able works. And as if that weren't enough, the occasional illuminated
manuscript, album of drawings, and related illustrated book has been
added to provide context. All in all, an extraordinary exhibition that
requires and rewards multiple visits-as you expect of the Morgan.
