A celebration of the stunning collection of artworks donated in honor of the creation of The Menil Drawing Institute Featuring outstanding 20th-century drawings promised or bequeathed to the Menil Collection for the opening of the Menil Drawing Institute, this elegant volume is a testament to the growing significance of drawings as stand-alone artworks over the past century. The drawings come from the private collections of well-known connoisseurs Janie C. Lee, Louisa Stude Sarofim, and David Whitney, and include works by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Eva Hesse, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock. Its chief curator Edouard Kopp profiles the Drawing Institute’s nature and scope, and noted scholars John Elderfield and Richard Shiff discuss historical aspects of drawing, while Terry Winters muses from an artist’s viewpoint.

Drawing Is Everything: Founding Gifts of the Menil Drawing Institute

Arts & Photography

Shiff, Richard

Winters, Terry

Kopp, Edouard

Elderfield,John

History & Criticism

The Menil Collection

A celebration of Robert Motherwell’s drawings that provides new insight into the thematic continuities and techniques that informed the artist’s working methods\nThroughout his long and prolific career, Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) sustained a fascination with making art on paper. His multifaceted drawing practice was an integral part of his search for a personal, spontaneous language of mark-making. Presenting works spanning from The Mexican Sketchbook of the early 1940s to the Joyce Sketchbook of the 1980s, this overview of Motherwell’s work on paper highlights the way the artist embraced the suggestive potential of his materials—blending the accidental and the intentional in the creative gesture. Large-scale reproductions encourage close looking and immerse the reader in details such as a stroke of the brush or a tear of paper, while an essay by Edouard Kopp examines how the artist’s practice of “automatic drawing” dovetailed with his love of paper and ink in the creation of these unique and compelling works. The book closes with Motherwell’s own “Thoughts on Drawing” (1970).\nDistributed for the Menil Collection\nExhibition Schedule: Menil Drawing Institute, Menil Collection, Houston 
(November 18, 2022–March 12, 2023)

Robert Motherwell Drawing: As Fast as the Mind Itself (Menil Drawing Institute Series)

This lovely book highlights key moments of the French landscape tradition from its emergence in the 1600s to its preeminence in the 1800s. The selection of drawings from the Getty’s collection shows a variety of techniques, functions, and styles, and includes examples by François Boucher, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Lorrain, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Camille Pissarro, Théodore Rousseau, and Georges Seurat. Together these images reveal a fascinating tension between a passion for the real and the quest for an ideal. The author provides a general introduction to landscape drawings and brief explanations of each of the works. Along with drawings, pages from artists’ sketchbooks are also included.

Capturing Nature's Beauty: Three Centuries of French Landscapes

J.paul Getty Museum

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), arguably the most important French landscape artist of the mid-nineteenth century and a leader of the so-called Barbizon School, occupies a crucial moment of transition from the idealizing effects of academic painting to the radically modern vision of the Impressionists. He was an experimental artist who rejected the traditional historical, biblical, or literary subject matter in favor of “unruly nature,” a Romantic naturalism that confounded his contemporaries with its “bizarre” compositional and coloristic innovations. Lavishly illustrated and thoroughly documented, this volume includes five essays by experts in the field. Scott Allan and Édouard Kopp alternately examine Rousseau’s diverse techniques and working procedures as a painter and as a draftsman, as well as his art’s mixed economic and critical fortunes on the art market and at the Salon. Line Clausen Pedersen’s essay focuses on Mont Blanc Seen from La Faucille, Storm Effect, an early touchstone for the artist and a spectacular example of the Romantic sublime in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s collection. This catalogue accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from June 21 to September 11, 2016, and at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek from October 13, 2016, to January 8, 2017.

Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau

Allan, Scott

The celebrated French artist Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) is primarily known as a sculptor today, but his contemporaries widely lauded him as a draftsman as well. Talented, highly innovative, and deeply invested in the medium, Bouchardon made an important contribution to the European art and culture of his time, and in particular to the history of drawing. Around two thousand of his drawings survive—most of which bear no relation, conceptual or practical, to his sculpture—yet, remarkably, little scholarly attention has been paid to this aspect of his oeuvre. This is the first book-length work devoted to the artist’s draftsmanship since 1910. Ambitious in scope, this volume offers a compelling narrative that effectively covers four decades of Bouchardon’s activity as a draftsman—from his departure for Rome in 1723 as an aspiring student to his death in Paris in 1762, by which time he was one of the most renowned artists in Europe. His accomplished and dynamic style is analyzed and copiously illustrated in a series of five interrelated chapters that serve as case studies, each of which focuses on a coherent group of drawings from a particular period of Bouchardon’s career.

The Learned Draftsman: Edme Bouchardon

Biographies & Memoirs

One of the most imaginative and fascinating artists of eighteenth-century France, Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) was instrumental in the transition from Rococo to Neoclassicism and in the artistic rediscovery of classical antiquity. Much celebrated in his time, Bouchardon created some of the most iconic images of the age of Louis XV. His oeuvre demonstrates a remarkable variety of themes (from copies after the antique to subjects of history and mythology, portraiture, anatomical studies, ornament, fountains and tombs), media (drawings, sculptures, medals, prints), and techniques (chalk, plaster, wax, terracotta, marble, bronze). With five essays by experts on Bouchardon’s sculpture and graphic arts, more than 140 catalogue entries, and a detailed chronology, this book aims to demonstrate the originality of Bouchardon’s art within the cultural and social context of the period, while suggesting the subtle relationship between, as well as the relative autonomy of, the artist’s two careers as a sculptor and a draftsman. This lavishly illustrated publication represents an unprecedented and thorough survey on this major and unique artist from the Age of Enlightenment, offering indepth scholarship based on unpublished material.

Bouchardon: Royal Artist of the Enlightenment

Trey, Juliette

Scherf, Guilhem

Desmas, Anne-Lise

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