Here Be Monsters: Robert Hughes, 1976--1980
Nowhere does this citizenry perspicuity seem truer than in the mead of past master drawings. The springs have irrefutably dwindled. Fifty years ago, the publication on the retailing clog of a slab by one of the dedicated framer figures of 15th and 16th century depiction—Dürer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo—was not uncommon. Today one would seldom be more surprised if a room dodo waddled into the Parke-Bernet vending range. Drawings also are not a adolescent man's pastime; they behest a inchmeal of perseverant connoisseurship (tinged with philatelic fad) that only the old mainly have. But belatedly last month a strange disproof of the prohibit went on show at Manhattan's Pierpont Morgan Library: a faction of 115 works from the amassment of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene V. Thaw. Thaw, 47, is doubtlessly the most well-heeled inaccessible art agent of his period. His noteworthy interest as a accumulator, however, is big boss drawings, which he began to buy in the anciently '50s. The whole anthology—including numerous works by Era Bartolomeo, Rembrandt, the Tiepolos, Rubens, Claude, Watteau, Goya, Degas and Cezanne—is to be premised to the Morgan Library, and this is its first open viewing. Through 1976 it will be seen, after the Morgan showing, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Guild of Chicago, and the Inhabitant Veranda of Canada. The show is not, and could not presume to be, a recapitulation or compendium of monochrome. As a art-lover, Thaw admits his bigotries, and one of them is antipathy to Italian flowery. But in his partiality areas, distinctively the 19th century, an exquisitely satisfied soup has been at profession. One would have to go some hauteur before pronouncement drawings as favourable as Cézanne's big cramming of a birthday card actress, in which the pencil strokes endow every uniform of human nature and gather of material with the crystalline solidity of hoary limestone; or Daumier's brace of lawyers, whispering together like upholstered vultures. The choice of looking at drawings has something in inferior with voyeurism. It lies in the compassionate...