Rebecca Nemser

JOHN WILSON is a clas­si­cally trained artist whose life’s work has been a search for enduring, spir­i­tually charged images of African-Americans. JOSEPH NORMAN weaves together all kinds of imagery into elab­orate compo­si­tions that are elegant, yet full of feeling. “For both of these artists, art remains an important way to think about what it means to be human and to have an inner life.”

GERRY BERGSTEIN’s drawings show scribbles, scrawls, crossings-out, angry re-workings, markings of struggle and doubt. From this chaos of marks on paper emerge luminous little still lives, marked by the process of decay: visions of a world in flux, where every­thing is changing, growing, living, dying, and being reborn.

GUERCINO drew like an angel — his gorgeous line curls across the page; his brush forms shadows that suggest a sense of the roundness and fullness of life. His best drawings are more than drawings — they are blessings, exquisite expres­sions of those moments when Art and Faith are one.

Light as a whisper, these elegant images, in the delicate style known as ROCOCO, convey the “sweetness of life” before the Revo­lution. Some­thing of the warmth of the artist’s hand still lingers in all the little jabs and touches of chalk or ink that make up these deli­cious little 18th century drawings and prints.

MENZEL’s drawings often show people and things as if they were turning into shadow, turning into smoke, dissolving into a cloud; just about to disappear. He said, “I early culti­vated the habit of drawing things as though I were never to see them again.”

Drawings as a picture making, story telling, dream machine. Drawings that dance, stretch, yearn, arch, and glide across the page. The plea­sures of looking emerge here not from what is observed but from how it is rendered; not the image but the artifice.

“There is some­thing divine about his talent, some­thing compa­rable to the power of a great poet who, out of the worlds of truth and falsehood, creates a third whose borrowed exis­tence enchants us.”

LE CORBUSIER created his own myth through the organic gener­ation of forms. His genius constantly renewed itself, pulling new phenomena into the orbit of his thought and recre­ating them in the purified, monu­mental yet human forms of his architecture.

Each rectangle is like a picture of a picture, moving through a series of trans­for­ma­tions. The tremulous drawings are like jottings, hiero­glyphics, messages in bottles, unreadable post­cards, ideas coming into being, the first appear­ances of the not-yet-visible, the impal­pable images taking form before our eyes.

For a twentieth-century audience brought up on abstraction, INGRES’s greatness, his fasci­nation, lies in the abstract qual­ities of his line, its restless, obsessive movement across the page. Ingres’ line has power, grace, life; it’s bril­liant, dramatic, neurotic, even perverse. He told his students, “Drawing is every­thing; it is all of Art.”

CLAUDE LE LORRAIN depicts the moment just before trans­fig­u­ration — the moment just before women turn into goddesses, or girls turn into swans, or life turns into art. His light is dusk and twilight — the darkling light that washes the physical world in unearthly beauty and fills the heart with an intox­i­cating sense of possibility.