Defining Drawing Down

That boast, of course, depends upon a vast apparatus of safety nets: strongholds, treasuries, depositories; moats, fences, security cameras, and armies of guardians alert to those who would view those few precious strokes of pencil and brush that the ages have left as their record. Such as, to grab one six-by-seven-inch sheet of paper from the whole array, the charcoal drawing by Simon Vouet (1590-1649), perhaps a self-portrait from his teenage years with tousled hair and a spiky beard quite contemporarily punk, or perhaps from 1612, when he accompanied the French ambassador to Istanbul to paint the grand vizier (a task prohibited by Turkish law and so accomplished secretly from memory). Whether Vouet’s own face or not, it is as vivid a ghostly presence as black chalk can offer, a real, scrawny, know-it-all up-and-comer with the very snows of yesteryear caked to his boots.

For our acquaintance with Vouet and some few dozen other seventeenth-century French draftsmen we are in debt to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, whose show “Poussin, Claude and Their World” is being shown at New York’s Frick Collection through December 1. The better part of the exhibition’s seventy-one drawings are figure studies in a religious or classicizing vein that was to set the mold for the fine arts for the next two hundred and fifty years.

It is hard to look at these legions of Greek gods, Madonnas with children, and unknown gentlemen without acute advanced symptoms of museum fatigue. Indeed, it is almost impossible to see these sheets of paper as the artists’ contemporary would have–as so many ground-plans and lesson-books for the construction of a civilization still essentially on the drawing board, as ammunition in an ongoing war between the luxuriating Catholic south and the iconoclastic Protestant north in Europe. How is one to look at Poussin’s “Judgment of Solomon,” for instance, except as the doodled preliminary to the solemn canvas now in the Louvre, which the artist accounted his finest work but which most non-connoisseurs will find more than a little chilly. Learning to like either the canvas or the sketch, and even to look at them, is work.

Happily, most of the work has been done for us by the compilers of the show’s exemplary catalogue, Emmanuelle Brugerolles (curator of the collection in Paris) and David Guillet. Each of the ninety-three plates is glossed with its own small essay, which comprise, in aggregate, a crash course in French classicism. Probably, most who attend the show will defer complete mastery of the catalogue’s entire info-dump until they have reached the baroque heaven pictured in its pages, where such tasks are better undertaken. But for bringing the task within our compass the Frick and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts deserve our thanks.

THE SAME CAN’T BE SAID for “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,” the new show at the Museum of Modern Art, in exile at the museum’s temporary space in Queens through January 6. It would be a wonder if one could not find something to admire or be amused by among the over 250 drawings by twenty-six recent artists. But as with the “Whitney Biennial” or the German “Documenta” exhibitions, the real wonder is how, with a whole world to glean from, the pickings should be this slim.

Admittedly it has become harder and harder these days to shock gallery goers with anything that can be drawn or doodled or scraped off the pavement. What passes in the art world as food for thought–conceptual art–seldom rises to a level of inventiveness set by the better poets who work in the same hyper-ideating vein. In the épater department, the Queens show offers a second helping of Chris Ofili, the thirty-four-year-old Afro-British painter who stole the limelight at the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” show during its visit from the Tate in 1999. No lucky elephant dung this time; instead, artless doodles of African-American ladies and gentlemen, both in ball gowns, the whole mish-mash constituted from the tiny Afro-coifed heads of “Albinos and Bros with Fros.” All this contrivance to no visible satiric, ironic, or cognitive effect, but–like the proliferations of cartooned Snoopies in recent paintings by Nina Bovasso–a complex and conspicuous waste of time and (if buyers can be found) money.

In the mistier realm of conceptualism, “Drawing Now” offers aesthetic inflations whose cognitive weight can be taken in at a glance: Toba Khedoori’s crisp renderings of architectural details–a door, a strip of molding–each glorying in its own vast margin of blank white wall (a greater luxury here than at most venues, for the temporary space in Queens is not only scruffy but very cramped); an even larger installation, “Prison” by Los Carpinteros, a drawing showing five room-size grain silos converted into filing cabinets.

More in-your-face than these overgrown props from the surrealist warehouse are Yoshitomo Nara and Laura Owens’s take-offs on Japanese cartooning styles and American greeting cards and gift wrap. Here the art world sinks to its all-too-common lowest common denominator. Do we need to be told that preteen girls around the world love kittens unduly, and that kitsch is kitschy? To attend such demonstrations of the low taste of the great unwashed is like being lectured on the evils of globalization and cattle-herding by a stoned fourteen-year-old. Perhaps one might have found the teenage Simon Vouet, four centuries ago, as callow in matters of global politics, but at least he knew how to make a compelling likeness of human flesh. On the evidence here, that is a lost art.

The bright side? Some inventive architectural fantasies by Paul Noble and David Thorpe. There are also some fashion sketches in colored pencil by Elizabeth Peyton that are pretty enough to be subway posters, and sketches by Takashi Murakami and John Currin gawky enough to be lavatory graffiti, which I say without pejorative intent, since that seems the condition to which they aspire.

ALL IN ALL, not a compelling reason to venture to Queens–especially if you have not yet taken in “The Ages of Mankind: Time to Hope,” a visiting exhibition of some hundred paintings and sculptures from a consortium of Spanish churches and museums, on view at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine through November 24. Those inclined to believe that recorded history has been one long slide from a Golden Age will find evidence here. St. John’s is the New World’s most imposing simulation of the Gothic style, and the chain of apsidal chapels in which the show is installed provides an ideal setting–with the subdued natural lighting most of these works would have received in their original homes. Not all art benefits from the noonday glare of museum lighting.

Those who associate Spain with pain–the flamenco, the corrida–will also find evidence, for crucifixions, depositions, pietàs, and grisly martyrdoms are the stars of the show. True, there are some fine enthroned Madonnas and other happily circumstanced saints, including a statuary group of St. Anne teaching the child Mary to read (Mary points punningly to the first two letters of her own name), which is as winsomely charming as a tapdance by Shirley Temple. But it is pain–its cruel infliction and brave endurance–that is the overriding theme, the lesson that one is challenged to ignore at peril of one’s soul. The catalogue issued by the show’s Spanish Catholic sponsors underlines this by declaring several times that their intention in offering these works to view is not aesthetic but homiletic. They are meant to inspire faith in the Church and eternity’s sacred truths, to make us feel Christ’s pain and the Virgin’s sorrow.

Whether one shares that faith or not, one must appreciate the candor of this approach and its consistency with what we must suppose was the art’s original aim. Uninformed by such a purpose, many a crucified Christ or butchered saint would be hard to contemplate. I remember being in a room of a provincial German museum in which one winced from a sense that such a chamber of horrors was too much of a bad thing. But for those who like their Christianity marbled with darkness, “The Ages of Mankind” is essential viewing. Admission is free–though when you see the cathedral with its enormous timber bandage from the fire of a year ago, you would have to have a heart of stone not to leave a contribution to the building fund.

FOR A SHOW OF EQUIVALENT QUALITY, though much smaller in scope, you should return to the Frick, where the Poussin and Claude exhibition has ceded some of the museum’s limelight to twelve “Masterpieces of European Painting from the Toledo Museum of Art.” Toledo, Ohio, that is, and “masterpieces” isn’t just press-release puffery. There is an El Greco, “Agony in the Garden,” that out-Herods El Greco’s own St. Sebastian at St. John’s, and a frieze-like “The Flight into Egypt” by Jacopo Bassano that is worth a visit all on its own. The Renaissance lives up to its name in such a picture, which has that combination of sheer gorgeousness and grave dignity that was copyrighted by the Parthenon, but here we can see it in color.

The same combination still obtains in James Tissot’s picture of foreign visitors vogueing outside the National Gallery. Tissot was a Frenchman in Victorian London, and his painting, louche yet decorous, is like a Whistler that has learned to relax.

The show is like a little Frick within the Frick, and it’s drawn from a collection that came into being much the same way. Frick made his money in railroads, while Toledo’s Edward Drummond Libbey was in glass, but they flourished in that era when Europe’s treasures were spread at the feet of American millionaires like a field of daisies. As with the Spanish art at St. John’s, the Toledo pictures have found the right setting, for the Frick is like heaven’s own bank vault. (There is even, seven levels down, a special crypt built just after World War I in prospect of such an event reaching these shores. It has taken all this time for the idea to seem common sense.)

THERE REMAINS yet one more embarrassment of riches in New York: “The Thaw Collection: Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, Acquisitions since 1994,” which is on view at another Gilded Age mansion, the Pierpont Morgan Library, through January 19. Over a hundred immortal pieces of paper gleaned from a span of over four centuries, but, even so, much less likely to cloy than the similarly scaled smorgasbord further uptown at the Frick. Two reasons account for this: the sheer diversity of the offerings and the quirkiness of the collectors, Eugene and Clare Thaw, who culled these works from the auctions and offerings of the last twenty years.

This is the fourth exhibition at the Morgan Library of the Thaws’ remarkable taste and appetite. The Thaws are drawn to art that celebrates the artists’ unforced inclinations and intimate associations–familiar streets and domestic interiors, flowers, friends, country roads, and farm animals. These drawings aren’t prefigurings for some dramatic altarpiece or mural–which is only a way of saying that life and art became more middle-class after the Baroque. Art would finally pitch its tent among the commonplace, not the plaster casts and trumperies of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Unfortunately, along the way, there was a general loss of skill. Look at Odilon Redon’s charcoal drawing of Lady Macbeth. It is as hokey and inept as a drawing from a recent Disney cartoon. And Redon was teaching the next generation of Parisian painters, who would in turn teach draftsmanship to the artists on display at the Museum of Modern Art’s show in Queens.

The slide from the Golden Age is inexorable, yet along the way other little miracles of art would happen, and often in the unlikeliest places. The Thaws snapped up a lot of the best, such as a pencil drawing of a crumpled dahlia by Mondrian that he drew in 1920 in order to pay the rent. It hasn’t the same iconic status, but I like it better than “Broadway Boogie Woogie.”

The Thaws are not above acquiring a work for its anecdotal value, such as their small portrait of Rimbaud, probably copied from his group portrait with Rimbaud in it. But then, across the room, the seventeenth-century Dutchman Jacob Ruisdael has a “Ruined Cottage.” It is a sketch for a lost (though much copied) painting on the theme art seems to harp on most often and most plangently, which in recent years has been forced back into our view: the vanity of human wishes, the fragility of the fabric of civilization, the danger we are always in.

Thomas M. Disch is the author, most recently, of “The Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry.”