ARTS Like one of James Bond’s Martinis, the once tranquil waters of the Old Master drawings market have recently been decidedly shaken (not just stirred). A new generation of dealers has had the audacity, or temerity, to present not only the traditional fare of Italian and northern masters of the 16th to 18th centuries and occasional additions from early the 19th century but also works of the 20th century. Even, sometimes, of the 21st.
It was probably the distinguished London-based dealer Jean-Luc Baroni who first began to include the occasional bravura Degas or Boldini watercolour at the end of his catalogues in the late 1980s. Since then, prompted by the dearth of high-quality Old Master drawings coming to the market, numerous dealers have begun to inch their way along the 19th century and beyond. None, however, has been bolder than the British private dealer Flavia Ormond, who two years ago began to embrace not only coolly considered abstract pencil drawings by Ben Nicholson but the likes of Richard Long dripping white china clay down shiny black card or printing circles of fingerprints in Avon mud on Korean paper.
“I had shown 19th-century and even the odd 20th-century drawing before”, she explains, “but I wanted to take it all further, and look at how artists since the Renaissance had continued to reinterpret the line.” She is also moving beyond the western tradition. Her most recent catalogue of Old Master & Modern Drawings culminated in the delicate web of interlocking blue and white circles emerging from a black ground (priced around £15,000) confected by the Iranian-born artist Shirazeh Houshiary in 2006. It is a salutary thought, none the less, that the least expensive drawing she sold at this year’s Grosvenor House was not a contemporary work but a black chalk study for the Urbino Crucifixion by the 16th-century master, Federico Barocci.
May’s Salon du Dessin in Paris and the forthcoming London drawings week (July 5-11) reflect just how much the notion of the “master” drawing has expanded in recent years. There are 20 dealers taking part in the Master Drawings in London event, staged in galleries in and around Bond Street and St James’s, and they offer pretty much something for everyone.
In a single show, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art displays an extraordinary array of pan-European works spanning 500 years and virtually every conceivable medium used on paper. Here is a superb 16th-century allegorical design for a wall decoration by Lelio Orsi; a gouache landscape by the 17th-century Dutch artist Gerrit Battem; a Pillement pastel; pen, ink and wash architectural designs by Quarenghi for the Riding School of the Imperial Horse Guards in St Petersburg; an illustrated letter by Manet; Manuel Orazi’s bold black-and-white 1903 chalk, “An Automobile Race”; a composition by the pioneering Czech abstract artist Frantisek Kupka; one of Nolde’s luminous watercolour seascapes; and Lucian Freud’s intense early drawing of the 13-year-old Charlie, whom the artist met when he broke into his studio. Executed around 1945 in pencil, coloured chalks and pastel on brown Ingres paper, the drawing sold straight from the catalogue.
What has always appealed to collectors is the intimacy and immediacy of artists’ drawings. They are often the artist’s most vital and revealing productions; the freest of first thoughts, schemes and studies.
Here, for instance, is Sickert’s pen-and-ink sketch of the Café Vernet in Dieppe, heavily annotated with colour notes. The elegant turn of a girl’s elaborately coiffed head is noted by Boucher in the softest of black chalk; the luscious, expansive pink derrière of a bending female nude worked up by Georg Grosz in gouache, oil and watercolour.
One of the most intriguing drawings on show is by that committed draughtsman, the sculptor Auguste Rodin. During the 1890s he came to the conclusion that the expressive qualities that he so admired in Michelangelo were dependent not on traditional life drawings but on the study of movements and emotions that he had to learn to intuit. He therefore developed a training technique that involved drawing without taking his eye off the model.
The resultant studies were swift, wiry, spontaneous outlines, which he would later “correct” by adjusting the line or by adding blocks of transparent watercolour. “A Nude Woman Standing in the Sea” is one such example, only recently rediscovered and in superb condition.
Another of the week’s highlights is the loan exhibition staged by Andrew Clayton-Payne of works on paper by the Victorian artist Richard Dadd, many of which, like his study for “Crazy Jane”, were made during his incarceration in the psychiatric hospital Bethlem, also known as Bedlam.
There are, of course, more treats in the salerooms. Sotheby’s July 9 auction offers a small group of characteristically exquisite pencil portraits by Ingres of the 1830s and 1840s (estimates from £60,000) while on July 8, Christie’s presents three recently rediscovered Goya brush-and-wash drawings from his celebrated private albums.
From the Witches and Old Women Album comes “Vision: going down quarrelling”, which presents two women falling through the air, one grinning with malicious delight as she grabs the hair of the other who screams out in pain (£800,000-£1.2m).
