Matita e Carta:Who's Afraid of Drawing?

"I sometimes think there is nothing so delightful as drawing" - Vincent van Gogh.

Umberto Boccioni - Against the Light (1910)

It was a sunny Friday afternoon and I'd walked from Canonbury station, along the New River, to the lovely little Estorick gallery to see an exhibition they'd called Who's Afraid of Drawing? Works on Paper from the Ramo Collection. Truth is, I wasn't that thrilled by the prospect of it and an afternoon in the park or, better still, a beer garden seemed far more tempting.

What with it being the longest day, the solstice, and all that, those things would surely arrive soon enough and when I arrived at the gallery I realised I'd not need to wait long at all. It was a small show - which I was quite happy about it, but it was also a much better show than I'd hoped for. It's good to override negative instincts.

Stretching from the early years of the twentieth century to the 1990s when art, apparently, became 'contemporary', it was an attempt to show that Italian drawing was both central and, conversely, on the edge of 20c art. It also sought to challenge the perception that drawing is somehow subordinate to painting and sculpture.

Split into four questioning, and ever so slightly pompous, sections (Abstractions?, Figurations?, Words + Images = ?, and What about Sculptors?), I'd say the show was a qualified success. There was some great stuff in it (Umberto Boccioni's tenderly cross hatched girl's face being a prime example) but there was also some utter dross. Cosi cosi!

Fortunato Depero - Trinacria Beer (c.1926-27)

Giorgio de Chirico - Untitled (study for Archaeologists) (1928)

I've left out most of the rubbish and tried to include as many of the good drawings as possible. It's too easy to slag stuff off, people do it on the Internet from the moment they wake up it seems, so I like to focus, when possible, on positives. On art. On music. On countryside. On friendship. On love. 

Fortunato Depero's Trinacria Beer is all angular vorticist lines and pleases the eye just as much as metaphysical maestro de Chirico's study for Archaeologists and Soldati's Olympic Champions (Italy picked up twelve golds, second only to the hosts, at that year's games held in Los Angeles). They're all very different drawings but they could all be lumped together loosely by both style and era.

Atanasio Soldati - Olympic Champions (1932)

Lucio Fontana - The Cowards (Pratelli, Sironi, Panti) (1933)

Cagnaccio di San Pietro - Untitled (Study for the Triptych at the Ospedale al Mare, Venice Lido) (c.1941)



Giulio Paolini - Untitled (1977)

You could chuck a rare pre-abstraction sketch by Lucio Fontana, The Cowards, in with them too. Simplified forms bringing portraiture down to its essence and essentials. These artists were masters at doing that but others like Cagnaccio di San Pietro and Giulio Paolini take a far more traditional approach, unsurprising perhaps from the country that gave us the Renaissance. 

There's room for both devotional and more transgressive forms of art in this world and there's also space between the two. A space that Gino Severini, Renato Guttuso, and Domenico Gnoli all inhabit - yet all inhabit in their own very different ways. 

Severini's watered down cubism is stylish if not as forward thinking as you imagine he likes to think it is, Guttuso does a great job of capturing the spirit and energy of a peasant's march in Sicily, and, best of all, Gnoli's two works both fascinate and amuse in equal measure but in completely different ways,

Gino Severini - Untitled (Romana at the Table) (1947)

Renato Guttuso - Untitled (Study for Occupation of Uncultivated Land in Sicily) (1949)

Domenico Gnoli - Caprice no.6 - The Apple (1955)

Caprice no. 6 looks like James Gillray has attempted to turn a Roman altarpiece into the marvellous mechanical mouse organ from the seventies kids TV show Bagpuss and Boat IV features a poor ol' horse looking sadly out to a presumably ever lasting sea on a strangely curving boat. It's an alluring, and odd, piece of work that made me both giggle and feel a bit sad simultaneously.

Domenio Gnoli - Boat IV (1957)

Tancredi - Untitled (Witticisms) (1960)

Just along the wall from it you get a rare flash of colour. Tancredi's watercolour witticisms certainly brighten up the room and have all the expressiveness of a van Gogh if, sadly, none of the depth. Lack of depth is certainly not something you could accuse Lucio Fontana of. He's famous for ripping holes out of his paintings!

Turns out, and it's no surprise really, he took the same 'liberties' with his drawings.Truth be told, though, they don't work quite so well without the aspect of colour. Not for me anyway - and certainly photographs don't do them justice. A nice idea but it didn't delay me long.

Lucio Fontana - Untitled (Spatial Concept) (1951)

Lucio Fontana - Untitled (Spatial Concept) (1951)

Adolfo Wildt - Animantium Rex Homo (1925)

Giacomo Manzu - Untitled (Two Lovers) (1943)

I didn't spend that long with Wildt's Animantium Rex Homo or Manzu's lovers either. Technically proficient, not lacking in charisma, and all that old stuff but my eye was distracted by the far scribblier Medardo Rosso drawing nearby. It had something of a haunting, mysterious quality. It's the sort of drawing you can't help but create a narrative for. Mine was of a detective nature. Detective instinct.

Medardo Rosso - Untitled (Figures on a Street with Tree)

Bruno Munari - Illegible Writing of an Unknown People (1973)

I was equally taken by Munari's made up writing. It looked like upside down faux-cyrillic and the cube of red gave it a kind of Wyndham Lewis quality which is never a bad thing in this blogger's eyes. Merz's Fibonacci was hardly aesthetically pleasing but as fan of mathematics, and a man who used to be familiar with the Fibonacci sequence, I felt compelled to check the sums.

I much preferred the voyages into abstract expressionism and retrofuturism space age chic provided by Carol Rama and Maria Schifano. They were two of my favourite drawings in the Estorick. They both had .... movement. To create movement in a still picture can be quite easy, picture Billy Whizz or the puffs of smoke we draw near people's bums to indicate they've just farted, but to create a realistic and powerful, forceful sense of movement is quite another.

Rama's marks rush on to the page with an impatient urgency that clearly owes a little to Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner while Schifano's seem to float in space, a gravity free drawing that acts as an amniotic fluid to calm the troubled mind.

Mario Merz - Fibonacci (1970)

Carol Rama - Untitled (1969)

Maria Schifano - Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (Drawing with the Sun) (1964)

Maria Lai - Diary (1979)

Taking a cold shower after my ejaculation of purple prose I moved over to Maria Lai's illegible diary and Gianfranco Baruchello's childlike assemblage. Wasn't sure what to make of the diary (although I've returned, drunk, from gigs with notes not much better in my moleskine) but was quite taken with Baruchello's precarious looking scene. Some sort of combination of beehive, a Japanese pod hotel, and the set of the bizarre Saturday night TV show All Together Now!

No idea what it's all about but that's hardly the point of art. Equally, Alberto Burri's bagel spiral and Antonio Sanfilippo's dots were sheer abstract decoration. Burri's dirty doughnut disappearing down a black hole was the one that most drew me in.

Gianfranco Baruchello - Nous, mon Coeur, que... (1977)

Alberto Burri - Untitled (Combustion) (1957)

Antonio Sanfilippo - Manuscript (1962)

Roberto Crippa - Untitled (Spiral) (1960s)

Tano Festa - 15. N. 11 (1961)

I also liked the abstracted pencilisations (I know that's not a real word but it's what a guy I went to school with, Philip Hoare, used to say and it just came to mind) of Roberto Crippa (something avian about it), Tano Festa (like one of Barnett Newman's 'fag packets' or a view from a ceiling down on to a double bed), and Achille Perilli whose work could be read as a bastardised landscape.

Carlo Accardi left me cold, there's no rhyme or reason in this - it's down to feeling, yet Pino Pascali's rusty looking typography pleased me no end. I love rust and I love the alphabet so what was not to like about it?

Achille Perilli - Untitled (1958)

Carla Accardi - Untitled (1954)

Pino Pascali - Untitled (Alphabet) (1960s)

Tomaso Binga - E is for Erba (Pop Alphabet Book) (1976)

More letters, and even a naked lady, cropped up on Tomaso Binga's E is for Erba and, nice though that was, my eye was more drawn to Mirella Bentivoglio's Stamps. It just looked kinda neat and that was the thing with this show. There was no great over reaching story, no huge narrative to be had, no political points to be made, just lots of very good, and some not so great, drawings.

Art for art's sake. A pleasure in the act of creation as much as a pleasure in creation in itself. The Estorick, as ever, had put together a tidy little show that brought to my attention lots of artists I'd never heard of before and soon I was back out in the sunshine and in a park, not a beer garden. Saluti!

Mirella Bentivoglio - Stamps - Oofs for OOFice Hours (1971)