New York“Drawing Then: Innovation and Influence in American Drawings of the Sixties”Dominique Lévy // January 27–March 19In Bernice Rose’s 1976 catalogue essay for “Drawing Now” at the Museum of Modern Art, she enumerates two predominant views surrounding the importance of drawing. On the one hand, Rose quotes Lawrence Alloway to suggest that the medium is “the artist at his most rigorously intellectual”—its primary value since the 16th century. On the other, drawing also contains a metaphysical urge: “the artist’s first and most intimate and most confessional marks.”Unlike many similar shows, the museum-quality “Drawing Then,” mounted by Dominique Lévy gallery on the 40th anniversary of “Drawing Now,” does not commoditize or make quaint Rose’s nuanced and paradoxical observations. Part homage, part revision, “Drawing Then” brings together 39 artists and more than 70 works on paper. Some groupings are intuitive and visually arresting—such as the delightfully queer threesome of Andy Warhol’s Dance Steps (1962), Tom Wesselmann’s Study for Mouth, 8 (1966), and Ed Ruscha’s Trademark [#3] (1962)—while others are perplexing but nevertheless productive, such as Jasper Johns’s Wilderness II (1963–70) beside Cy Twombly’s Untitled (1960). Here, a Pop explosion of glamour and desire shares the room with an understated meditation on the artists’ presence, and in the juxtaposition of Johns’s insertion of an actual hand onto the paper and Twombly’s lyrical swatches of ballpoint pen, we see emotional and intellectual processes at work, side by side.“Drawing Then” takes Rose’s observations seriously, treating the medium as both intensely conceptual and distinctly bodily. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the grouping of two spare, academic works by Wayne Thiebaud—Ice Cream Cone (1964) and Striped Necktie (1968–76)—a phallic pairing made all the more unsettling when seen alongside Warhol’s sexy, but limp, Heinz Tomato Ketchup with Campbell’s Soup Can (1962). There can be no more rapturous readings of Thiebaud’s allegedly delicious imagery. Instead, we have a lone dessert steeped in the gathering dark—sickening in its evocation of Stephen King’s It—and a lonesome necktie that is simultaneously a memento mori of masculinity and a souvenir of a bourgeois sexual encounter. Drawing is both transparent and opaque, immediate and distant. —William J. Simmons
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