Breaking Ranks, Pencils Ready

Since the 1950s, the most uncompromising artists have approached the blank page as a battlefield, determined to make their mark in a new way. Paper tigers with real teeth, the explorers in drawing of the past half-century have challenged every art historical shibboleth. For those not satisfied with making depictions or designs, special tactics have been necessary. First, an overall strategy. Chance or geometry? A scribble or a grid? Then, the weapon. Pen, brush, or finger? Ink, pollen, paint, or soot? Lastly, the tone of the attack. Coolly rational or wildly emotive? Well aimed or blustery and scattershot?

As partisans of arguments on paper, Wynn Kramarsky has collected relics of these esthetic skirmishes, amassing a case for the lasting inventiveness of post-minimalist and process-oriented drawing. This selection of fifty-nine drawings from his comprehensive collection includes works by the innovators of the post-war avant garde as well as emerging artists who have continued to find new ways to extend the limits of what a drawing might be.

Wynn began tracking down challenges to the conventions of drawing in the heady days of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The earliest drawing here, Robert Rauschenberg’s Untitled (Mirror) from 1952, remains one of the freshest, demonstrating the artist’s breakthrough employment of solvent transfer to disperse ghost-like images from art history and the newspaper alongside swaths of pale watercolor and smears of crayon.

Other drawings by mid-century masters portray new ways of conceiving of subject matter in drawing. Ellsworth Kelly’s untitled tempera and gouache from 1964 transforms compositional push-pull into a literal struggle of two rounded-off squares of color. The slightly squatter blue lump cheekily infringes on the territory of its counterpart. Pure color takes on a personality distinguished by shape and form.