Art
'Language' of drawings speaks of minimalism

By Virginia Wageman
Advertiser Art Critic

An exhibition at the Contemporary Museum of about 100 drawings from a private New York collection presents a broad range of works on paper from the past half century, the earliest a Barnett Newman dating from 1946.

Brice Marden, Masking Drawing No. 20, 1983-86, oil, ink and gouache on paper. Marden made a series of "masking drawings" in the 1980s, using paper that he had previously used to mask off areas of oil paintings to create straight edges. Peter Muscato

Other precursors to minimalism in the show are Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns. Reinhardt's untitled gouache painted over a photograph of one of his Black paintings exemplifies the geometric abstractions that anticipated minimal art. Kelly, in his colorfield paintings, reduced form and color to their essence — a splendid example of which is his 1964 untitled painting on paper, with two geometric shapes in primary colors of red and blue. Johns used subject matter like American flags and beer cans to create works that challenged the viewer to ask, "What is an artwork?"

For the minimalists, subject matter is reduced to a few simple geometric shapes, as in Kelly's and Johns' works, or to limited changes in color, as in Reinhardt's untitled work. Today, we accept Johns' depictions of everyday objects as statements on the nature of art, but when he started painting flags in the 1950s he was seen as revolutionary.

It is just this defining of art that is the unspoken theme of the drawings show, which is titled "Drawing is Another Kind of Language." In examining the "language" of these drawings, that is, the marks of their makers, we become privy to the essentials of artmaking.

Included in the show are works by stalwarts of 1960s minimalism, among them Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra and Frank Stella.

The works demonstrate the variety possible within the canon of minimalist art, from the spare, geometrical compositions of Judd or Mangold to the expressions of the sublime in the drawings of Ryman or the rich colors in LeWitt's works.

Most striking about the exhibition overall is, in fact, the amount of freedom evident in what would seem a highly constraining aesthetic.

Minimalist artists, with their devotion to the grid, tend to create mathematically regular compositions that are reduced to the bare-bones essentials. However, in most of the works exhibited, the grid is simply the formal framework for explorations of space and form.

Marden's "Masking Drawing No. 20" is a case in point, with its dense layers of red, blue, yellow and orange in the upper section and blotches of paint overall that refuse to be confined or organized by the overpainted grid lines.

Barnett Newman, Untitled, 1946, ink on paper. The artist used tape to mask out the vertical white spaces in two broad vertical strokes. Peter Muscato

Eve Aschheim, Jill Baroff, Nancy Haynes, David Jeffrey, David Lasry, Ann Ledy, Elena del Rivero, Mark Sheinkman and others in the show all use the grid as an organizing element in their recent works. However, each uses it only as a starting-off place for evocative demonstrations of the expressionistic possibilities within a minimal framework.

The collector of the drawings exhibited at the Contemporary Museum pushes the definition of drawing to include any unique work on paper (and with paper he includes such supports as Mylar, a polyester film). Thus monotypes, usually classified as prints, are included in the show. This blurring of the boundaries, reflecting the idiosyncrasies of the collector, serves to enrich the selection.

Though works not conventionally linked with drawing are included here, this is basically a good, old-fashioned drawings show, to be appreciated for the kind of intimacy and freshness that drawing can bring to the artmaking process.

Virginia Wageman can be reached at VWageman@aol.com.