The Tenth Annual MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK week will take place January 23 through January 30, with a Preview scheduled for Friday, January 22, at 30 leading art galleries on the Upper East Side’s “Gold Coast’ in New York.
Originally conceived as an annual walk-through, MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK has grown into a ‘must see’ event, receiving strong support as its range and influence has grown each year. Each exhibition is hosted by an expert specialist and many works on offer are newly discovered or have not been seen on the market in decades, if at all.
Critics applaud the fact that the most respected drawings dealers show important pencil, pen and ink and chalk, pastel and charcoal drawings, as well as oil on paper sketches and watercolours from the 16th through the 21st centuries.
New exhibitors in 2016 include Allan Stone Projects, a New York gallery founded in 1960 that has enjoyed sustained success mixing established artists with emerging and mid-career artists. Its exhibition is titled “Process and Presence: Mastery in Drawing” and includes figurative, landscape, still life and abstract works by prominent artists such as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Wayne Thiebaud, Franz Kline, and Gaston Lachaise.
The 130-year old Kraushaar Galleries, a highly recognized fine art source for important American art of the first half of the 20th century, as well as selected contemporary works, will be a new exhibitor at MASTER DRAWINGS week this year. Katherine Degn says Kraushaar will be featuring works by Marsden Hartley as well as Dorothy Dehner, among several important American artists. Kraushaar Galleries has a long history of exhibiting works on paper. Early shows included prints by European artists, which then expanded to include drawings and watercolors by Seurat, Picasso, Manet and Redon, among others. By the second decade of the 20th century the gallery was becoming increasingly American with watercolor and drawing exhibitions by the contemporaries Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, William Glackens, Gifford Beal Charles Demuth, William and Marguerite Zorach and Guy Pène du Bois. Its commitment to works on paper continues with recent shows by younger artists such as Catherine Drabkin and Lee Walton while continuing its commitment to historical material. Other recent exhibitions include The Creative Process, 1930 – 1950; and Figuratively Considered – Works on Paper by Selected Artists Who Participated in the 1913 “International Exhibition of Modern Art.”
Degn says, “Dorothy Dehner drawings from the later 1940s and early 1950s are a rarely seen. They explore the personal and experimental yet vital and bold nature of her early years as an artist. Dehner’s visual vocabulary has diverse influences ranging from her experience as a serious dancer to the freedom and personal autonomy of the emerging abstract movement. This was further reinforced by her exposure to the European avant-garde during a 1925 trip to Paris, her study with Jan Matulka, and her friendship with John Graham. These sources combined to produce works that fuse aspects of cubism, surrealist abstraction and gestural elements. This drawing, made during the last years of her marriage to David Smith, documents both the love and the marital struggles in symbolic and at times surreal iconography.”
A third new exhibitor is Découvert Fine Art gallery of Rockport, MA. Steven Law says the galleries exhibition during MASTER DRAWINGS week will be titled “The Feminine Observed, 16th to 20th century, and New Acquisitions.” It begins with the Coronation of the Virgin, a Counter-Reformation study for an altar, probably Antwerp, 1620. Other drawings exploring the feminine within the Biblical narrative include The Virgin, Child, and St. John after a print by Laurent de La Hyre (Paris 1606-1656), a 17th century Genoese rendering of The Meeting of David and Abigail, and a small 16th century Northern School scene from the story of Holofernes. These are followed by Amorous Peasants in a Bower by William De Heer (1638-1681).
Drawings of the feminine in mythology include a Study of a Centauresse, Satyre, and Horseman after the architect Charles Normand and attributed to Theodore Gericault (Rouen 1791 – Paris 1824), Pluto Abducting Venus attributed to Nicola Maria Rossi (Naples 1690-1758), and Venus or Galatea after Luca Cambiaso. Drawings by Vuilliard and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux portray women in interiors. Modern ideas about the feminine are explored through works by Andre Derain (Chatou 1880 – Garches 1954), Leopold Survage (Moscow 1879 – Paris 1968, and an artist of the Secession Style, Franz von Bayros (1866 Zagreb – 1924 Vienna), whose work The Logic of Divorce was printed in a 1913 edition of Lustige Blätter. New acquisitions include works by, attributed to, or after Francesco Cozza, Veronese (and/or his workshop), Pellegrino Tibaldi, Vittorio Maria Bigari, Negretti, and Jan Lievens.
Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art returns to Master Drawings week with a special exhibition titled, “Drawings by the Muralists.” This group includes watercolors and sketches by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Leonora Carrington, Jean Charlot, and Elena Climent. A highlight of the show is Orozco’s “Five Heads (Beggars)” a gouache from 1940 that came from the Estate of the American playwright, Elmer Rice, and has been in a private collection for almost 50 years.
The www.masterdrawingsinnewyork.com web site offers details on participating dealers and their specialties, and suggestions on how to work with a dealer to build a collection.
