An Art History Primer on Drawings, Courtesy of Master Drawings Week

The historic art fair, in its 20th year, is the ultimate teachable moment on the zest and heft of drawing, from the Old Masters to now.

G reetings once again from New York. Since the recent Renoir Drawings at the Morgan Library was a bit of a dud, I had to look elsewhere in my quest for great drawings. So I came back to the city for what I knew would be Valhalla, and that it was. The New York Master Drawings Week is awesome but takes an eye that wants to be teased and then released into ecstasy. It takes discipline and endurance, too.

The weeklong program is an unusual and possibly unique concept — 36 drawings dealers from America and Europe show a selection of drawings, Old Masters to now, in galleries on the Upper East Side. It’s the old progressive dinner concept except the feast is art, and “progressive” means you go from gallery to gallery. No hooey about Gaza, drug smugglers here illegally, and, horror of horrors, finding it tough to get free abortions, and who’s the new “they” or “them” in the hood. This is the event’s 20th anniversary.

I started at Christopher Bishop Fine Art on Madison Avenue and 80th Street since Bishop, as dealers go on the young side, runs the fair. A specialist in drawings from the 15th through the 20th centuries, he’s best known for his sharp connoisseur’s eye and a memory better than a computer’s. He’s made big-time discoveries, once nailing a mystery painting as a Guercino in part by the similar shape of the subject’s eyes in another drawing known to be Guercino’s. He’s identified drawings by Barocci, Algardi, and Honthorst and is the go-to authority on Pontormo’s drawings.

I loved a drawing by the French artist Jean Baptiste Jouvenet (1644–1717), the zenith of French Baroque for muscular action, diagonals, and emotion. He painted complicated religious pictures with big casts: The Raising of Lazarus, The Last Supper, and The Expulsion of the Money Changers from the Temple. His grandfather is thought to have been Poussin’s teacher, so Jouvenet has lineage and establishment cred.

His Expulsion is part of a series of four scenes that, when presented to Louis XIV around 1706, so pleased the Sun King that the curls in his wig seemed to dance. Based on the paintings, Louis commissioned a set of grand tapestries. A black-and-white chalk drawing shown by Bishop was the model for the king’s textile designers. Tables flipped over, agitated dogs, animal sacrifices being driven to the temple, and the action-hero Jesus in the center evoke pivotal chaos. Painting, drawing, and tapestries were showpieces and catapulted Jouvenet to the directorship of the Royal Academy.

Bishop has been showing at the fair for years and has seen the Old Master drawings market evolve from the haunt of curators to a broader audience of younger collectors smitten by the spontaneous look of drawings, their conceptual quality, and their small scale. Not everyone wants a big painting — six feet of mayhem — on the walls. The drawing’s got a wild frame, too, part Baroque, part Rococo. Price, of course, can be a factor for anyone. For $48,000, Bishop’s Jouvenet is packed with quality and action.

Stephen Ongpin is a London drawings dealer without a New York base, so the Old Master paintings dealer Adam Williams, next to Bishop on East 80th Street, lent his space. Hands across the sea. Ongpin serves up a feast, about 40 drawings of top museum caliber from Baccio Bandinelli’s Group of Eleven Putti at Play, from the 1450s, based on a Donatello bronze and showing mischievous putti playing with an annoyed tortoise, to a Howard Hodgkin collage from 1981, with splendid things by Tiepolo, Turner, Thomas Girtin, Delacroix, Vuillard, and Sargent in between.

If I were to take one home, though, I’d pick Giorgio Vasari’s ink, wash, and chalk preparatory drawing for his Stoning of St. Stephen altarpiece in Pisa, from around 1570. It’s by Vasari (1511–1574), a fine painter, architect, and collector but a seminal art historian and art critic, and we know how hard it is to be an incisive, discerning art critic. It’s a drawing so sketchy and suggestive, a fevered dream, and all the more apocalyptic for that. We can hear the thunks as brutes pummel the soon-to-be-martyr with boulders. It’s $80,000.

For many artists, drawings are vitally important for developing small but profound ideas, conveying a motif with immediacy or recording one on the spot, or relishing ink, chalk, pencil, watercolor, or washes, among other core ingredients of drawings. Impasto and slashing paint strokes are all fine and dandy, but drawings tend to be small, and drama unfolds either subtly or, when it’s volcanic, over small terrain. Figuring out who did this or that drawing, complex but unsigned, can enlist a corps of detective aesthetes. A very finished portrait drawing can convey the mystery and specificity of a black-and-white Hollywood still or deliver a speaking likeness through dashes, sinuous lines, or washes, things oil paint often just can’t do. A mundane motif, even if it’s a foot, turns as majestic as a mountain when Michelangelo draws it.

Speaking of which, a newly discovered Libyan Sibyl’s Foot — from about 1511 and roughly 5 by 5 inches and thought to be the only one of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling drawings to survive — sold at Christie’s Thursday afternoon. I rushed to see it, pedal to the metal, Nike Alphaflys on my feet. It’s a nice enough drawing, but, putting aside Michelangelo and its rarity, well, you need to have a foot fetish truly to love it.

I enjoyed seeing Agar Marteau’s wares, which focus on the Old Masters. They’re a nice young couple showing at Master Drawings for the first time. He’s French and a former ballet dance at the Paris Ballet. She’s from Midland, Texas, but she lived in Paris for a few years until they married and decided to move their drawings business to New York. It’s probably easier for young dealers in New York. The art scene in Paris is so stratified, and dealers tend to be covetous. Paris may be a better place to source art, since many good things have stayed in family collections for centuries until money’s needed. America’s a better place to sell.

They have wonderful things — a knockout Franz Kline drawing from 1960 and an Anders Zorn portrait — but my eye went to Louis Hayet’s Fair by Night, a watercolor from 1889, in part because I was at an art fair and have written a lot in the last couple of years about modern nocturnes. Hayet (1864–1940), though a very good artist, isn’t well known at all, which means his work’s a great buy. He was a Neo-Impressionist in the 1880s and ’90s and part of a circle that included Seurat, Signac, and Pissarro, nearing the end of his life. He was smitten by color theory and color wheels — he hints at this in a carousel and a Ferris wheel in both complementary colors but also tones of, say, purple, brown, and yellow that slowly change based on their proximity to light, in this case to Paris’s newfangled electric light. It’s $35,000. I love Agar Marteau’s taste and think they have a bright future.

Hazlitt, London-based but with a New York place, too, is certainly venerable, selling art since the 18th century. Two portraits struck me in a show called Independent Eye. Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) has to be among the gods in French art. Think of The Oath of the Horatii, death scenes of Socrates and Marat, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Cupid and Psyche, and his calm, cool, and collected portraits. A confrere of Robespierre and Marat, both psychopaths, David much loved Napoleon, a bloodthirsty tyrant.

David was also a nut at worst or a naïf, at least in his politics, a wacko woke Jacobin. That said, he wouldn’t have been hounding cops who are enforcing the law in Minneapolis — too dirty a scene — but he would have been fashioning the image of anti-ICE kooks as heroes. David was an image maker but also a superb events planner. He orchestrated Marat’s funeral. Did he hedge his bets? Possibly. When Robespierre threatened to drink hemlock if arrested, David offered to join him but seems to have missed the appointed hour — the Committee of Public Safety could never get the trains to run on time — and Robespierre, in any event, was hauled off to the guillotine before refreshments were served.

Hazlitt is offering Pierre Maximilien Delafontaine’s portrait of David in prison. Painted in 1794, the year David landed in prison, it’s in black-and-white chalk and 6 inches in diameter. It shows the artist as a swivel-eyed loon but too good-looking to turn the stomach. Delafontaine (1777–1860) was a student of David’s who later became a sculptor working in bronze. He visited David every day when he was in jail. The round format is a nice touch. David’s looking at us, telescopically. We’re being recruited.

It draws on David’s famous self-portrait painting, which is bigger and also from 1794. But in black and white, it doesn’t distract us with color. We focus instead on David’s fervor, those fierce, intense eyes, and Delafontaine — unlike David in his own self-portraits — doesn’t hide David’s deep scar from a fencing injury. It’s really a groove that caused facial asymmetry and what looks like a perennially swollen cheek and lip.

Hazlitt’s exhibition is mostly portraits, and many are self-portraits by artists who are not necessarily on the autism spectrum but certainly look stressed, obsessed, and in a deep lather. Antonio Mancini’s self-portrait from 1875 is next to Delafontaine’s portrait of David. It’s a good comparison. Mancini (1852–1930) was an Italian painter who moved to Paris and became friends with Degas, Manet, and especially Sargent, who once called him the greatest painter alive. He was a leader in the Italian Verismo movement, a version of the French Realism of Courbet, Carolus-Duran, Daumier, Millet, and Rosa Bonheur but infused with operatic angst and irresolution.

Delafontaine’s portrait — peak Neoclassical — lives in a space where fervor mixes with a certainty that looks fixed and logical when it’s really irrational and crazy. Mancini, 80 years later, depicts himself with slashing lines, wild curls, self-doubt that goes beyond mere youth, and a mental dishevelment so profound that it creates a zigzag halo around his head. He did indeed go crazy. Chalk — creating dense, thick lines and limited color, really only black-and-white voids — makes the case far better than color. Drawings go where paintings can’t. Black-and-white invites extremes.

Not everything at New York Master Drawings Week is Old Master. White Writing on Pink, a gorgeous Mark Tobey from the 1960s, is at Denenberg Fine Arts, the West Hollywood dealer, and to be had for $375,000. It’s gouache on paper board, not tempera, Tobey’s usual medium, but it’s got everything you want from a Tobey. Tobey (1895–1976) is an Abstract Expressionist, far better than Pollock but quieter. Inspired by Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, he uses tiny marks rather than florid gestures. He’s never formulaic like, say, Rothko, and White Writing on Pink might involve a riff on Rothko — a wide rectangle of whites and pinks floats in the composition.

J. M. W. Turner’s Study for “The Ring,” from 1839, is a discovery made by Tom Mendel, the young British dealer who runs Nonesuch Gallery in London. By the 1830s, Turner was revered, but, like every other competent watercolorist in England, he had a side gig doing illustrations for publishers of poems and novels. He did The Ring to illustrate not Wagner but Thomas Moore’s prose poem “The Epicurean,” published in 1839. His watercolor is a touch of Peter Pan, a touch of Goya. The illustration got mixed reviews, but I like it. For collectors of small-format Turners, it’s a must and in beautiful condition with vibrant colors. It’s $200,000.

Nonesuch rented its Master Drawings space from Jarrett McCuster, a young American dealer not part of Master Drawings, but he’s got good, edgy taste, and I liked his portrait of Edmond Duranty’s great-aunt on her deathbed by Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904), the wonderful French painter known for his still lifes and close friendships with Whistler, Manet, Degas, Zola, and Duranty, the novelist and art critic who promoted the Impressionists in the 1870s. McCuster grew up in Bucks County, an arts hub, and started buying and selling art as a teenager. I love young chutzpah and vision, leavened at least a bit by reason.

Auntie, who raised Duranty after his mother abandoned him, had indeed just died so she’s a still life. Fantin-Latour drew her with economy but close observation. Death is part of life, the ultimate moment but one that’s eternal. Drawing gets to its essence. A painting would require lots more time and demand fanfare, clutter, and, of course, color. Degas, a brilliant artist, iconoclast, and art collector, eventually owned it. It’s $35,000 and, given that it depicts a corpse of an old lady, it’s strange, electrifying, quiet, intimate, tender, and gripping. McCuster, drawn by its power, bought it at a small auction house. It had been in a private collection since it was sold at Degas’s estate auction. He did the research and found the story. Drawings dealers do this all the time.

I loved my time at Master Drawings. I didn’t visit every dealer but soldiered to at least 20 over a day and a half. The event is on for a full week. Yes, a setting like the Park Avenue Armory or even the Javits Center would be best for one-stop shopping as well as conviviality and collegiality promoted when everyone wanders under one roof. Renting the Armory is expensive, though, and going to different environments is an adventure. It takes stamina and commitment. Getting around in Manhattan, even in a postage stamp like the Upper East Side, is a nightmare because of traffic. This week, “snowcrete” piled high. The slush at intersections is disgusting. My feet were tired.

Speaking of feet, or a single foot, the Michelangelo drawing of the Libyan Sibyl’s foot, the only one of his Sistine Chapel drawings to come down to us after 500 years, sold for $27.2 million, an auction record for a work on paper. My spies tell me jigs were danced at Christie’s.