WITH a cover that consciously or otherwise reflects recent editions of Ernst Gombrich’s deservedly popular Phaidon book The History of Art (1950), Susan Owens, of V&A fame, offers some 20 short chapters of a chronological history of drawing. We are reminded that “Drawing is democracy,” as its necessary materials can often be very cheaply obtained. This book, alongside a pack of pencils, chalks, or inks, would be ideal for anyone who still hangs up a Christmas stocking.
Beginning about 50,000 years ago, when the human brain began to make images capable of expression, she charts some 100 artists with developing and changing understandings of “drawing” and its materiality. It is as if we stand over the artist’s shoulder, watching how he or she makes an image appear with line after line — and how such hand movements came to serve scientific discoveries and to plumb emotional depths and psychological realities.
Although she deliberately omits 18th- and 19th-century British watercolourists, her broadly chronological volume is comprehensive and tantalises enough about each of her subjects to encourage us to look for more. A really useful glossary follows (bistre, plumbago, hatching, and sinopia might feature in any Christmas quiz) with an appended bibliography.
Choosing a somewhat larger canvas, Martin Gayford exhibits all his usual trademarks; we learn a great deal about Gayford, and sometimes artists get a word in edgeways. The book is a further excavation of interviews and conversations that he has conducted over 30 years: skilful part autobiography, part art criticism.
Photo Jason Schmidt © Oscar Murillo. Courtesy the
artist and David ZwirnerOscar Murillo in front of his painting manifestation (2020-22), oil, oil stick, graphite, and spray paint on canvas and linen. From How Painting Happens
Visitors to Manhattan can see El Greco’s The Opening of the Fifth Seal within a few city blocks, on Fifth Avenue, of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted 300 years later, but it feels as if we are being encouraged to walk in step with the author. What did he see in Central Park? Where did he go next?
Contemporaries and modernists fill the pages — Gillian Ayres, David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Bridget Riley, Luc Tuymans — and rub shoulders with the greats of the past: Rembrandt, Titian, Van Gogh, and Saenredam. Their histories show how they first came to art and then what they did next. Looking at art becomes a way of thinking, and Gayford shows us how we can think more deeply. That, too, is an encouragement to take up art.
Both authors are poorly served by their publishers in the matter of sourcing illustrations. Yale properly captions each, but then wastes four pages repeating the same information at the end, adding only the dimensions and place or collection, which would be more useful alongside the image. Thames & Hudson makes Gayford’s readers trawl through the picture credits to search out other works. Maybe that is just for another Christmas game waiting to be played.
Canon Nicholas Cranfield is the Vicar of All Saints’, Blackheath, in south London.
The Story of Drawing: An alternative history of art
Susan Owens
Yale £25
(978-0-300-26047-2)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
How Painting Happens (and why it matters)
Martin Gayford
Thames & Hudson £35
(978-0-500-02742-4)
Church Times Bookshop £31.50