Parallel lines

Any survey of the history of art is riddled with holes, since no container – book, course, television series, podcast – is large enough to enclose more than a fraction of the visual art produced in the tens of thousands of years since art began. These holes open up around the author’s biases: gender, geography or period, for instance. This leaves plenty of room for later historians, who have their biases too. And so it goes on, each new history a corrective of the last, which awaits its own correction a generation later. Criticism of the survey makes sense, then. But embracing its flaws might enable readers to see it as a creative interpretation of the past rather than truth carved in stone. Two new books prove this. Each takes a medium (one drawing, one painting) as a means to navigate through the backstory of art. Both treat the basic unit of that medium – a mark on a surface, made by a material that registers the movement of a human body – as a living line that connects the present to the past.

Susan Owens’s The Story of Drawing: An alternative history of art is the more traditional of the two. It is structured chronologically and maintains the largely western content of the art history survey books you’ve probably read. Like many of its precursors it begins in medieval Europe and finishes in the teens of the current century, along the way alighting on many familiar names: Botticelli, Rembrandt, Goya, Kusama. Yet the nature of Owens’s approach allows her book to frame these artists differently, as well as representing in itself a critique of the way the history of art is generally told. She leans into the problem of drawing, which is one of definition. Given the range of media gathered in the term – pencil, pastel, charcoal, ink, not to mention bodily fluids, wire and neon – what exactly is drawing? It’s a term that, for Owens, neither can nor should be defined. Instead it gives a name to a particular relationship to art-making, one that is informal, immediate, available to all and as personal as it gets. Owens’s history of art values privacy and proximity as alternatives to the grand gesture, the masterpiece and the declamatory. The history of drawing is, like the history of writing, quiet. It is made, and experienced, mostly in solitude.

The Story of Drawing stays close to making. We’re alongside Angelica Kauffman as she makes her unadorned sketch of the “Apollo Belvedere” in Rome in the 1760s, its economy perhaps a result of the “unwelcome attention” a solitary woman drawing a nude male statue might have attracted at the time. We’re next to John Constable in the East Anglian fields as he draws trees and clouds, and workers lugging scythes, to be worked up later into paintings. We watch Paolo Uccello in his Florentine studio, building his startling image of a three-dimensional chalice from the marks of ruler and compass, which looks, as Owens points out, as though mapped out by computer. Drawing permits such intimacies. Whereas the studio of a painter or sculptor requires separation from the world, and often a staff of assistants, drawing happens anywhere. Rarely commissioned and infrequently displayed, drawings keep hold of this closeness.

Owens’s book matters because drawing continues to be marginalized in public understanding of what art is. Because of their size and frailty, drawings are easily lost or destroyed; because of their delicacy, museums tend to show them rarely, and then only in dim light; because of their privacy, they can seem obscure; and because of their usual lack of colour, they can often fail to appeal to modern eyes. The Story of Drawing makes the case for drawing as uniquely able to convey aspects of human experience that no other medium can. Sofonisba Anguissola’s drawing of her little brother bawling as a crayfish nips his finger, made c.1554, is a case in point. What might in one of the artist’s paintings be described in terms of heavy-handed symbolism – an allegory for the pains of youth, or something – stays in the realm of life as it really happens, thanks to the modesty of the medium used. You wince along with him. And when Agnes Martin dragged her pencil in even grids across her white-painted canvas (in “Morning”, from 1965) the result, thanks to the subtly mottled texture of the surface, is a kind of humanized geometry in which the bumps and kinks of the drawn lines testify to the work’s handmade qualities. Both drawingscollapse the historical distance between viewer and object. Owens’s attention to the practice of making nudges that process forward.

Painting, on the other hand, is everywhere. It dominates museum exhibition schedules, auction house sales, many young artists’ practices, commercial gallery walls and the history of western art itself. Yet this ubiquity masks a paucity in public awareness about the specific work of making paintings and the kind of thinking that takes place when maker and medium meet. The title of Martin Gayford’s new book – How Painting Happens (and why it matters) – identifies the nature of this hidden understanding. By attending closely to the process of making, bolstered by the author’s extensive interactions with artists, whose insights pepper the book, it makes the case for finding meaning in paintings in the circumstances of their production. To paraphrase Roger Ebert on the movies, it’s not what painting’s about, it’s how it’s about it.

Gayford’s book is structured not according to historical chronology – a convention that tends to treat art as a story of gradual improvement, rather than the cyclical and recursive thing it really is – but to the series of choices made by painters in the studio. As though watching a working artist in slow motion, we are led from the preparation of a surface to mixing the paint, through colour, gesture, content and choosing a title. Along the way, ideas of finish and resolution, beauty and ugliness, judgement and intuition emerge as products of material decisions rather than externally imposed concepts. Each of these steps is accompanied by examples across time and place, from Helen Frankenthaler to Diego Velázquez, Paula Rego to Nicolas Poussin. (Like Owens’s, Gayford’s selection is mostly western and skews lofty: there’s no room for comics, animation or street art in either book). These are moments in a painting’s life that are generally hidden from view when we encounter, say, a Monet on a gallery wall; you won’t find them discussed on the label alongside. Yet all these decisions add up to how paintings mean, as much as or more than what they appear to literally depict.

Gayford gives the example of Van Gogh painting on a tea towel: awaiting a shipment of new canvases, he just couldn’t wait to get going. He describes Willem de Kooning’s distinctive technique of mixing his paint with safflower oil and kerosene as like “someone concocting a meringue or vinaigrette”. Rego’s use of props and mannequins, meanwhile, made her studio “a cross between a gigantic nursery and a puppet theatre”. By being granted access to these behind-the-scenes processes, we get much closer to the series of decisions and responses that make up what Gerhard Richter called “the daily practice of painting”. A consequence is that the paintings reproduced in the book are made new. The tea-towel Van Gogh (“Daubigny’s Garden”, 1890) takes on an urgency and charm that might have gone unnoticed. De Kooning’s gloopy, skidding abstractions seem earthier, closer to the life of the body. And Rego’s complex psychodramas, such as “The Pillowman” (2004), which shows its grotesque protagonist reclining in the lap of a listless woman, feels charged with the memory of a live event, the artist as much audience as instigator of the strange scene unfolding before her eyes.

Much of what makes painting interesting – and what keeps it alive today, amid many alternative forms of image production and distribution, all of which are easier, quicker, cheaper and cleaner – is its ability to communicate beyond the written or spoken word. As Martin Gayford points out, its mode of communication through “non-verbal factors” – scale, colour, space – at once explains its immortality and exposes the limits of art history itself. It also makes the case for both books’ contributions to how we engage with works of art. If the authority of written language is increasingly pressurized by technologies that can produce it at astonishing speed, visual art’s way of translating thought in stubbornly physical terms can be seen as an act of resistance. “I’ve got a big brush and a little brush”, de Kooning said when asked to comment on his strategies. What more is there to know?

Ben Street is an art historian and author based in London

The post Parallel lines appeared first on TLS.