WHERE: Portland Museum of Art.
WHEN: Goes on view Thursday, January 30 through April 27, 2014.
Fine Lines: American Drawings from the Brooklyn Museum
BRIEF ABOUT: This exhibition presents 110 exceptional drawings and sketchbooks of American art, a significant body of aesthetically remarkable and historically important drawings that, due to their light-sensitive materials, are rarely exhibited.
Dating from the late 18th through the mid-20th century, the featured drawings will encompass a wide range of techniques, styles, and media, including graphite, ink, crayon, charcoal and pastel. There are, for example, carefully transcribed anatomical, portrait and nature studies; preparatory drawings showing an artist’s working methods and conceptual processes; quick sketches capturing an artist’s impressions of a motif; and highly finished compositions made for presentation or reproduction.
Seventy-four artists, include such famous hands as Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, William Trost Richards, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Violet Oakley, William Glackens, Edward Hopper, Marguerite Zorach, Stuart Davis, and Marsden Hartley.
The exhibition will be organized into six thematic sections devoted to enduring interests among American artists. This thematic installation also allows for instructive comparisons among artists of diverse periods and artistic approaches. Two sections feature the human figure: “Recording Anatomy” focuses on the nude body as a site of anatomical knowledge, artistic mastery and emotional expression; and “Fashioning Character” on the clothed figure in which costume helps to construct identity.
A section on portraiture, “Portraying Personalities” examines drawings that convey the distinctive appearance or personality of a sitter. “Telling Tales” considers narrative subjects and how artists craft a story through the integration of figures, objects and setting. Natural and urban environments are the focus of two landscape sections: “Exploring Nature” and “Observing the Built Environment” explore artists’ perceptual, emotional and aesthetic responses to the world around them.