Between the lines
Show marks Menil’s place as drawing center.
Calculations scribbled in pencil on a strip of drywall at the Menil Drawing Institute recently were the work of construction managers, not artists. But they reminded me that drawing is an instinctive, essential and functional human endeavor. • They also underscored the messages of the exhibition “The Beginningtitle referencesof Everything”both the excitementin the Menil’sof the main institute’s museum new building. building,The show’s which will open October 7, and the primacy of drawing, which informs the diverse practices of so many modern and contemporary artists. • The phrase originated with the late Ellsworth Kelly, who wrote, “When I see a piece of white paper, I feel like I’ve got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.” • One of the first salvos in a 30th anniversary celebration that will energize the Menil’s entire 30-acre campus during the next year and a half, “The Beginning of Everything” doesn’t sensationalize.
The show features nearly 100 drawings from the promised gifts of trustees Louisa Stude Sarofim and Janie C. Lee and bequests from the late David Whitney. Those gifts form the bedrock of the collection that will be housed in the new building designed by the Los Angeles firm of Johnston Marklee around a contemplative landscape by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
Though the drawing institute has been a program since 2008, the building will bring more attention to the largest and fastestgrowing body of work in the Menil’s holdings. It’s been widely touted as the first freestanding facility designed for the exhibition, study, conservation and storage of modern and contemporary drawings.
Reflecting the institute’s focus, the show contains works from the 19th and 20th centuries, when experimental-minded artists made drawing a more complex endeavor.
In classic Menil style, former chief curator David Breslin and curatorial assistant Kelly Montana have hung the works quietly and elegantly across the six themed rooms of the museum’s big west gallery, setting up strategic sight lines so visitors can contemplate relationships among the pieces.
This kind of art rewards close inspection.
“An inch out any way, and it doesn’t become a head anymore,” Montana said as we looked at a spare Philip Guston drawing. Its empty center prompts your imagination to fill in the man who might be looking out at you from inside a single, thickish line of ink.
Guston, an Abstract Expressionist, generated “Head” in 1968, when he was beginning to veer back to figurative work, developing his later-period, signature cartoonish style.
“He was just going where the ink took him,” Montana said. “He didn’t make studies, per se, but it was this moment of intensive drawing that prepared him for a seismic shift.”
A pair of small academic studies by Impressionist masters Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas flank Guston’s drawing, quickly establishing an evolutionary perspective.
Robert Rauschenberg’s small but busy “Preliminary Study Décor for Minutiae,” from 1954, is nearby. Composed from gouache, tempera, graphite, fabric, paper, printed paper and tape on board, it’s a study for a stage design and one of the artist’s first “combine” pieces.
Montana is pretty sure the board underneath holds a small work by the older painter Roberto Matta. Rauschenberg was both cannibalizing and rejecting a predecessor, she said; something he did famously the previous year with “Erased de Kooning Drawing.”
Though that work isn’t in the show, Montana has set up a face-off between Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning in the show’s second room. They didn’t approach drawing in the same way.
De Kooning often combined drawing and painting on his canvases. Rauschenberg constantly pushed boundaries with new methods and materials.
Four of Rauschenberg’s “transfer” drawings have a haunting presence, with free-floating, barelythere images lifted from magazines and newspapers that he soaked with a chemical solvent so they could be rubbed onto paper. A smaller, untitled work looks yanked from a journal; it’s covered with loosely applied rectangular scraps, mimicking a page of newsprint whose stories you might be able to peel off.
“He was just experimenting, not thinking about what a drawing was,” Montana said.
Jasper Johns, a master experimenter with a deep Menil relationship, will be celebrated in greater depth later this year. His career survey “The Condition of Being Here: Drawings by Jasper Johns” will be the first show in the new Menil Drawing Institute building. Menil scholars have worked a decade on Johns’ Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings, whose multiple volumes will document more than 800 works.
For now, Johns’ inkon-plastic “Souvenir for Janie,” from 1977, illustrates his genius. The always precise Johns was trying to relinquish some control with this piece: Ink on plastic pools and spills, going where it wants to go until it’s dry. Up close, all his blotting looks abstract; stand back, and you can discern his version of a 16th-century Hans Holbein portrait.
Richard Serra uses drawing to interpret his monumental Cor-ten sculptures after they’re finished. He melts oil sticks into big bricks to create beefy lines that capture his apprehension as he tries to reclaim the shapes of his massive steel works through intense, physical action at his own, human scale. “T.W.U. #10” is a good example, made with his preferred material of oil sticks melted into big bricks: The vertical lines echo the length of his drawing arm, stretched to its limit.
Eva Hesse and Vija Celmins use drawing more as a meditative practice. Hesse often drew circles on commercially printed graph paper, but a calming 1966 drawing in this show places luminous circles of varying opacities within a hand-drawn grid.
Georgia O’Keeffe didn’t make a lot of drawings, but “From a River Trip” (from 1962, when she was beginning to lose her eyesight) illuminates the texture of its paper with a dramatic, abstracted image of cliffs. I could go on. “The Beginning of Everything” offers much to ponder, also opening up intimate glimpses of ideas in the making by Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Cy Twombly, Arshile Gorky and Ellsworth Kelly.
Montana swooned in the room with Brice Marden drawings.
“I hardly know what to say about these,” she said. “My heart stops every time I see this wall.”
She loves the tangled, calligraphic lines that flow like nerve fibers to the edges of Marden’s “Cold Mountain” and the way he whited out select lines to create breathing room.
“It’s so visceral,” she said.
More — and major — Marden is coming during the new building’s ambitious first season.
“Think of Them as Spaces: Brice Marden’s Drawings” opens in January. Then comes the two-part, six-month exhibition “Roni Horn: When I Breathe, I Draw.”
The walls are in, the skylights have taken shape, and the paperinspired canopies of the institute are being assembled.
“The Beginning of Everything” whets the appetite enticingly. I can’t wait to see what’s next. molly.glentzer@chron.com