Rebecca Nemser

JOHN WILSON is a clas­si­cal­ly trained artist whose life’s work has been a search for endur­ing, spir­i­tu­al­ly charged images of African-Amer­i­cans. JOSEPH NORMAN weaves togeth­er all kinds of imagery into elab­o­rate com­po­si­tions that are ele­gant, yet full of feel­ing. “For both of these artists, art remains an impor­tant way to think about what it means to be human and to have an inner life.”

GERRY BERG­STEIN’s draw­ings show scrib­bles, scrawls, cross­ings-out, angry re-work­ings, mark­ings of strug­gle and doubt. From this chaos of marks on paper emerge lumi­nous lit­tle still lives, marked by the process of decay: visions of a world in flux, where every­thing is chang­ing, grow­ing, liv­ing, dying, and being reborn. 

GUERCINO drew like an angel—his gor­geous line curls across the page; his brush forms shad­ows that sug­gest a sense of the round­ness and full­ness of life. His best draw­ings are more than drawings—they are bless­ings, exquis­ite expres­sions of those moments when Art and Faith are one.

Light as a whis­per, these ele­gant images, in the del­i­cate style known as ROCOCO, con­vey the “sweet­ness of life” before the Rev­o­lu­tion. Some­thing of the warmth of the artist’s hand still lingers in all the lit­tle jabs and touch­es of chalk or ink that make up these deli­cious lit­tle 18th cen­tu­ry draw­ings and prints.

MEN­ZEL’s draw­ings often show peo­ple and things as if they were turn­ing into shad­ow, turn­ing into smoke, dis­solv­ing into a cloud; just about to dis­ap­pear. He said, “I ear­ly cul­ti­vat­ed the habit of draw­ing things as though I were nev­er to see them again.”

Draw­ings as a pic­ture mak­ing, sto­ry telling, dream machine. Draw­ings that dance, stretch, yearn, arch, and glide across the page. The plea­sures of look­ing emerge here not from what is observed but from how it is ren­dered; not the image but the artifice. 

“There is some­thing divine about his tal­ent, some­thing com­pa­ra­ble to the pow­er of a great poet who, out of the worlds of truth and false­hood, cre­ates a third whose bor­rowed exis­tence enchants us.”

LE CORBUSIER cre­at­ed his own myth through the organ­ic gen­er­a­tion of forms. His genius con­stant­ly renewed itself, pulling new phe­nom­e­na into the orbit of his thought and recre­at­ing them in the puri­fied, mon­u­men­tal yet human forms of his architecture.

Each rec­tan­gle is like a pic­ture of a pic­ture, mov­ing through a series of trans­for­ma­tions. The tremu­lous draw­ings are like jot­tings, hiero­glyph­ics, mes­sages in bot­tles, unread­able post­cards, ideas com­ing into being, the first appear­ances of the not-yet-vis­i­ble, the impal­pa­ble images tak­ing form before our eyes.

For a twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry audi­ence brought up on abstrac­tion, INGRES’s great­ness, his fas­ci­na­tion, lies in the abstract qual­i­ties of his line, its rest­less, obses­sive move­ment across the page. Ingres’ line has pow­er, grace, life; it’s bril­liant, dra­mat­ic, neu­rot­ic, even per­verse. He told his stu­dents, “Draw­ing is every­thing; it is all of Art.” 

CLAUDE LE LORRAIN depicts the moment just before trans­fig­u­ra­tion — the moment just before women turn into god­dess­es, or girls turn into swans, or life turns into art. His light is dusk and twi­light — the dark­ling light that wash­es the phys­i­cal world in unearth­ly beau­ty and fills the heart with an intox­i­cat­ing sense of possibility.