“You shouldn’t major in drawing.”
It was my sophomore year of college and I was perched on a rolling chair in my advisor’s office. “Why not?” I asked.
“Because art schools won’t take you seriously.”
I’m sad to say she was right. Since the prominence of the craftsperson gave way to the elevated role of the professional artist around the 1300s, much of the Western art world has considered drawing to be a lower and (literally) cheaper art form than the ostensibly more refined world of painting.
I chose to major in drawing anyway, fascinated by the questions it raises that the art world generally ignores: What can drawing do that other mediums cannot? When is a drawing a preliminary sketch, only created so it can disappear behind coats of glossy paint, and when is it a final product? Or can it be both? And how do we even define “drawing”?
The National Academy of Design’s current exhibition, Drawing as Practice, offers a unique opportunity to explore questions like these, especially through its inclusion of not only strict drawings, but prints, sculpture, embroidery, video works, and more, which offer a more holistic view. The show is a rare treasure trove of gems from luminaries across disciplines — works by Howardena Pindell, Mel Chin, Ana Mendieta, Sol LeWitt, and many other artists hang side by side.
Unfortunately, this show fails to use these masterpieces to deepen our understanding of the medium. Many of the individual works are brilliant, but their light is dimmed by an embarrassment of riches. It is difficult to fully enjoy the stupefying intricacies of Michael Waugh’s micrography or the smooth graphite planes of Adam Liam Rose’s work when the walls are crowded with hundreds of pieces, hung without an easily detectable schema or through-line.
One example is the treatment of Paul Cadmus’s seminal etching “The Fleet’s In!” (1934). This work was subjected to what may be one of the 20th century’s most famous cases of censorship — Cadmus’s honest (and delightful) representation of drunk, lewd, and very visibly queer sailors prompted the US Navy to remove the painted version of the piece from an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery. The censorship backfired splendidly when Cadmus made the etched version — reversing the usual order, in which the drawing precedes the painting — and newspapers across the country reprinted it. Cadmus knowingly used the democratic nature of printing to his advantage, saying, “They can tear up the canvas, but they will have a sweet time eating copper.”
But while Chief Curator Sara Reisman summarizes the censorship story in her essay for the show, she makes no mention of the importance of the specific medium — had Cadmus not recreated the painting as an etching, it never would have spread as far as it did.
The exhibition’s intro text says that it “illustrates drawing as a through-line in the National Academy’s history.” But we learn little about the Academy itself except, of course, that many artists have engaged in drawing there. A narrower focus on one aspect of the enormously diverse world of drawing — repetition, gesture, social action, or the blurry separation between preliminary sketch and final product are just a few of possibilities among the bounty of work on view — would have helped the show find its footing.
Still, there are many wonderful masterworks in Drawing as Practice. I hope drawing enthusiasts can study them and use the show as a jumping-off point to delve into this often-dismissed terrain in the future.
Drawing as Practice continues at the National Academy of Design (519 West 26th Street, Floor 2, Chelsea, Manhattan) through December 16. The exhibition was organized by Sara Reisman, chief curator and director of National Academician Affairs, and Natalia Viera Salgado, associate curator, with research and scholarship by Diana Thompson, director of Collections.
