Drawing Modern: Works from the Agnes Gund Collection

Drawing Modern illustrates major pieces by some of the twentieth century’s most important artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Arshile Gorky, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Paul Klee, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, and Cy Twombly. Works by a younger generation of artists are also included, among them William Kentridge, Gabriel Orozco, and Rosemary Trockel. Drawn from the extensive private collection of Agnes Gund, president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the works on paper collected here represent a panoramic view of the major developments in American art from Abstract Expressionism onward.

This remarkable group of drawings evinces an inclusive and pluralistic vision, comprising an unusual variety of media and styles, even as they are clearly grounded in a high-modernist aesthetic, and invested in the notion of the art object as an autonomous, organic whole. The abstraction characteristic of this work enables a complex personal, and even emotional, engagement. As Ms. Gund herself puts it, in her Foreword to the volume, "An especially well-rendered work makes my heart sing and my stomach get the squishy feeling of falling in love."