“Drawn from the Collection”, new at Tate Britain, is a good old-fashioned miscellany of an exhibition. It starts with a group of drawings organised under the rubric “Face to Face”, the pretext for an engagingly diverse series of intimate encounters with the distant and not-so-distant past. Young Stanley Spencer, visionary in the making, glowers darkly from a self-portrait drawing of 1913. Lucian Freud’s glum Narcissist stares frozenly at his own reflection. Sir Joshua Reynolds depicts himself screaming in mock-dismay, in his so-called Self-Portrait as a Figure of Horror, of 1784 – a warm-up exercise for the dramatic history paintings that he once dreamed of painting, instead of the portraits that were his stock-in-trade. Nearby, David Hockney catches a benign likeness of his own mother, surrounded by the clutter of home, in a spider’s web of lines. Adding a pinch of morbidity to the mix, an anonymous eighteenth-century artist contributes a fine-boned study of the skull beneath the skin.

 

 
“Stories Real and Imagined” flits from Henry Moore’s depictions of wartime slumberers, sheltering from bombs in the depths of the London Underground, to Hogarthian misdeeds and an obscure eighteenth-century fantasy of flight. Other sections are given over to animals, landscapes and cityscapes. In the topographical category, drawings of churches bulk large. Turner’s late nineteenth-century homage to the lacework delicacy of Ely Cathedral is shown cheek-by-jowl with the teetering mass of Leon Kossoff’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, of two centuries later. David Bomberg’s charcoal study of St Paul’s, a black silhouette perched above a scaffold of inchoate lines, is a potent relic of London during the Blitz. Bomberg’s drawing looks, itself, like the singed and smoking survivor of a bombing raid.

 

“Drawn from the Collection” is completed by a series of spaces devoted to the drawings of a number of leading contemporary British artists. David Shrigley’s shiveringly ironic cartoons stand out, along with Michael Landy’s obsessive studies of self-destroying machinery and his diagrams of the mad, wasteful mechanisms of global capitalism – antic studies in entropy. Tracey Emin scrawlingly confesses to her mis-spent youth in Margate (again). Richard Wilson, who deserves to be known as considerably more than the creator of 20:50 – his  celebrated oil-spill of a sculpture, once the pride and joy of the Saatchi Gallery – is represented by a number of preparatory studies for sundry projects. Each is an intricately plotted project, aimed at upsetting the applecart of audience expectation in one way or another. They are rather like Heath Robinson drawings, except that they exhibit the pragmatic approach of a man who actually intends to build his fantasies, whatever they might be – a snooker table plunged into the London subsoil, or an entire aeroplane, atomised then reassembled. All in all, this is an exhilaratingly diverse show, which seems to announce a new determination, on the part of Tate Britain, to pay a bit more attention to the medium of drawing – and not before time.

 

 

The runners might symbolise vitality but in repeating the same pointless action again and again, they could equally easily be interpreted as a living metaphor for the repetitious futility of most people’s daily lives. According to Tate Britain’s own press release, the work “presents the beauty of human movement in its purest form, a recurring yet infinitely variable line drawn between two points” – so you can even see it as a drawing, of a kind, if you should so choose. Just be careful it doesn’t knock you over.