Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium

, University Research Gallery, University Teaching Gallery, Harvard Art Museums
  • Folio recto: Blank; verso: Dead Red Partridge
  • Wooded Landscape
  • Seated Female Nude
  • Reclining Nude
  • Diana
  • Study of Arabs
  • The Mutiny on the Raft of the Medusa
  • Jeanne (Spring)
  • Peasant of the Camargue
  • Elevation of a Fireplace Wall
  • Napoleon Crowning Josephine (recto and verso)
  • Two Peasant Women
  • Six Head Studies
  • Love Seduces Innocence, Pleasure Leads Them On, Repentance Follows
  • Studies of Figures after
  • The Market Place
  • Study of the Borghese Gladiator as a Skeleton
  • Blindman's Buff
  • Café-Concert (A la Gaîté Rochechouart)
  • Study for
  • Study for the Start of the Race of the Barberi Horses
  • Study for the Portrait of Miss Crowe
  • Study for the Right Hand of Monsieur Louis Bertin
  • Portrait of Victor Hugo
  • Study for
  • The Sirens
  • Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus (Study for
  • Young Man with Downcast Eyes
  • After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Hair
  • Four Studies of a Severed Head
  • Street Scene, Evening
  • Sheet of Studies, including a Skull
  • Shells and Sea Plants
  • Landscape; verso: Composition Study
  • Portrait of Two Men
  • A Mounted Arab Attacking a Panther
  • Sketches of Dancers
  • The Instructive and Appetizing Meal: Voltaire and Three Dinner Companions(?)
  • Design in Memory of Benjamin Franklin
  • Portrait of Jean de Jullienne
  • Study for
  • The Genius of Liberty and Wisdom
  • Head of a Woman
  • Two Women and a Child
  • Artist Sketching on the Pediment of the Pantheon, Rome
  • The Butcher
  • After the Bath, Woman with a Towel
  • Chimera
  • Dog and Squirrel; verso: Crane
  • Woman Baking Bread
  • Astolphe Brings Back the Head of Orrile, for Canto XV of Ariosto's
  • Memories of a Drinker
  • Head and Counterproof of Head of a Man
  • Album of Twenty-Six Drawings
  • Bacchanal
  • The Ghost of Clytemnestra, from Aeschylus's
  • At the Circus: Jockey (Au cirque: Jockey)
  • Artist at his Easel
  • London Dray Driver
  • Race Course at Longchamp; verso: Section of grandstand area
University Research Gallery, University Teaching Gallery, Harvard Art Museums

Drawing became modern in the 18th century, when it left the confines of the artist’s studio to enter an expanded field of discourse, culture, politics, and social life. This transformation is most evident in France, where drawing was significantly, and influentially, repositioned and reconceptualized. This exhibition traces the emergence of the modern understanding of drawing from the 18th through the 19th century in multiple senses: as an autonomous form of expression, an index of the artist’s style, an object of aesthetic contemplation, an epistemological tool, and a commodity. The variety of techniques, materials, and approaches presented here offer a historically complex answer to the basic question: what does it mean to draw?

While historically grounded, the exhibition is not organized chronologically; rather, it is arranged around a constellation of categories that speak to key aspects of drawing. The display is divided into three sections—Medium, Object, Discourse—and, within them, into several subsections that treat the basic procedures of drawings not merely as the means but also as the agents of representation. “Medium” refers to the conjunction of materials and techniques with the historically specific conventions that govern their use in drawing. It explores artists’ interaction with, rather than simply their use of, the material bases of drawings. “Object” addresses the social and cultural functions and uses of drawing, focusing on its role as a tool of artistic instruction, its relation to reproductive technologies, its uses in architecture and decorative design, and its contribution to the production of knowledge. “Discourse” considers drawing as a means of conceptualization as well as a visual mode of thinking in and of itself.

This exhibition is the result of a unique collaboration between Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, the William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University; Elizabeth M. Rudy, the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Associate Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums; and the Harvard students who helped develop and organize the exhibition in the context of two seminars taught in the Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 semesters, in the museums’ Art Study Center.

The exhibition catalogue, featuring essays by students from the seminar Drawing: Object, Medium, Discourse, is available in the shop early February 2017.

Access the related digital tool on our website for more information about the works on view, including short entries written by students from the seminar Drawing on the Exhibition and audio commentary.

This project is supported in part by the Gurel Student Exhibition Fund and the Mellon Publication Funds at the Harvard Art Museums.

Share your experience on social media: #DrawingsatHarvard

Related Programming
Information about related events, including gallery talks and a lecture by Harvard professor Ewa Lajer-Burcharth on February 8, 2017, can be found in the museums’ calendar. View a recording of the February 8 lecture on Vimeo or YouTube.

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