The Snite Museum of Art recently opened its new French drawings exhibition with a lecture by Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Curator of Old Master Drawings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Grasselli received her PhD from Harvard, specializing in old master drawings.
This exhibition, “The Epic and the Intimate: French Drawings,” was assembled by Cheryl Snay, the Snite’s Curator of European Art. Snay selected 60 out of the Snite Museum’s Reilly ’63 Old Master and Nineteenth-Century Drawings permanent collection, which includes over 500 works.
Grasselli’s lecture was entitled “Capturing the Imagination: The Evolving Role of Drawings in French Art from Vouet to Degas.” In her presentation she featured prints from the exhibit, showing how drawings changed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century in both style and production.
Established in 1648, the French Academy of Art’s instruction of young Parisian art students included numerous stringent procedures. The academy established a method for the production of art, prescribing 4 steps to create a piece of art: free drawing, gesture, reassembly, and model drawings.
Grasselli said that artists “under the direction of the academy either succumbed to or broke away from what the academy wished.” According to Grasselli, drawing “was viewed as the beginning of the creative process.” At this time drawing was viewed “as what he [the artist] would transfer onto the canvas, [his way of] working out the contours, working through the composition.” Only later would drawing be accepted as a discipline of its own.
Italy was very influential for these artists as well as their time at the Academy. Most great French artists of this time, such as Vouet, spent a significant period of time in Italy. In fact, Grasselli said, “The influence of Italy upon French art cannot be overstated.”
Vouet spent 13 years in Italy and, in Grasselli’s words, “was indoctrinated to the Italian way of drawing, their way of drawing the nude – the human figure.” “Artists such as Claude Lorraine served as a contact point for French artists coming to Italy to learn more about art,” she explained.
The academy had a hierarchy of painting genres: history paintings, portrait, literature, and landscape. This was yet another restriction for artists in the academy. A rebellion arose in the academy over “line” versus “color.”
For example, Verdier uses precise lines to depict traditional topics while Rubens’s work includes more color and broken contours, capturing the image in a vital way. Artists like the colorists began to disregard the academy’s requirements. For example, Watteau “loved theatre and depicted this in his work.” Rather than depicting a historical scene he would create figures independently and then fit them into a landscape he created at a later date.
Watteau died in 1721 at the age of 36 but during his short life he and Le Fosse, thought to be Watteau’s teacher, had created a new genre called “Fete Gallant,” which depicted everyday things. Many great artists such as Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Francois-Lemoyne, and Francois Boucher began producing this genre of art.
The next few artists Grasselli discussed began to show a shift toward drawing “for much more than drawing but rather drawing out of love.” Men like Hubert Robert, who specialized in architecture and also Fragonard and Jean Baptiste Greazes all separated themselves from the academy.
Even though he left the academy, Greaze began to “rebel against the lightness,” said Grasselli. “He was one of the moralizing artists of the second half of the eighteenth century and there was always a second, third, and fourth meaning to the elements of his paintings.”
Also at the end of the eighteenth century, Revolution politics began to enter art even as the Revolution shut down the Academy in 1795. Artists such as Vincent, Delacroix, and David began to depict neo-classical art similar to those created by Verdier in the 1710’s and 1720’s.
“All the development moved back to the beginning,” said Grasselli. There was a renewed debate of line and color, this time between Ingres and Delacroix. Grasselli described Ingres as “a careful artist, using his pencil to do everything perfectly,” while Delacroix worked “with pen and action.”
At this point, Grasselli asserted, the content of the art “no longer had anything to do with the academic.” She said that their drawings were “finished works in and of themselves, which would never have happened during the time of Vouet.”
Grasselli ended her lecture with Degas, who created drawings both as drafts for his paintings and as works in and of themselves in his “The Fallen Jockey.” With Degas, Grasselli said, “the beginning and end are all present in one place. This gives it good closure.” Degas would become a great Impressionist painter, and the Impressionist movement, officially gaining notice with its first exhibition in 1874, signified a whole new era of French art.
Those in the DC area may visit Grasselli’s exhibition “Italian Master Drawings from the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection: 1525-1835” in the National Gallery of Art until November 27.
While it’s impossible for Madeline to pick a favorite artist from the exhibition, she says the works of Antoine Watteau and Hubert Robert are especially superb. You should join her at the Snite on November 17 at pho
