Date: 01-10-1991
Owning Institution: South Bank
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999                    
Subject:   17th Century  19th Century  20th Century  Now  Renaissance          

''A CRITIC at my house sees some paintings,'' wrote Gauguin in his Intimate Journals. ''Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.'' For centuries, drawing has been regarded as the most private medium of artistic expression: the medium in which the artist is most truly and inescapably himself; the medium of involuntary self- revelation. Diderot, writing some 120 years before Gauguin, referred to the sketch as ''the artist's work when he is full of inspiration and ardour, when reflection has toned down nothing; it is the artist's soul expressing itself freely''.

Yet admiration for the spontaneity of drawing has also, traditionally, been tempered with a certain suspicion. Deanna Petherbridge, curator of ''The Primacy of Drawing'', a new South Bank touring exhibition which opened in Bristol last week, notes wistfully in its catalogue that: ''It is always with some regret that art historians announce that they cannot link a particular drawing with a work in another medium (the hierarchical value of painting or sculpture is implicit in this), and must settle for a drawing being autonomous.''

''The Primacy of Drawing'' is a small exhibition with large ambitions. Its curator is, herself, an artist known for large pen and ink drawings - disorientating visions of imaginary architecture that distantly echo Piranesi - so perhaps it is no surprise that she should have chosen this opportunity to make out her case for drawing as an unjustly neglected medium. This is a polemical show, whose chief argument - ''that drawing constitutes a super-text (definitely not a sub- text) to the history of art'' - seems intended to provoke further debate between those who either support or oppose the idea that draughtsmanship still has a central role to play in the practice and education of artists today. But what makes it particularly arresting and unusual is its method: the way in which it juxtaposes extremely fine drawings from different times, traditions and cultures - so that, to give one of countless examples, you find a Picasso sketch from the 1950s next to a Palma Giovane study from the early seventeenth century - to make its various points.

Petherbridge has devised what she calls ''a loose typology'' of different kinds of drawing - ''The Classic Contour'', ''The Expressive Gesture'' and so on - to give a degree of cohesiveness to her show. However its chief virtues are not coherence or logic but, rather, a kind of scatterfire eclecticism, and a lively awareness (often a virtue of shows curated by practising artists) of the technical strategies common to artists from widely differing traditions.

Some of the comparisons made are quite startling. To see Cezanne's Study from the Statuette of a Cupid (circa 1890) beside Tintoretto's Christ on the Cross (circa 1565), for example, is to realise how inflated the claims customarily advanced for Cezanne as the first truly modern draughtsman may be. This is not to detract from the quality of Cezanne's drawing, that peculiar and poignant combination of decisiveness and hesitancy that issues in his characteristically unstable use of line - but it is to suggest that there is an important precedent for such a manner and that it lies, not somewhere in the forgotten margins of art history as a coincidence waiting to be discovered, but at its centre, in the grand Western tradition of post-Renaissance draughtsmanship. Tintoretto's study has just that nervous, tremulous quality of outline - that sense of a form defined, half-erased and then defined again - that we have come to think of as quintessentially modern (Cezannesque, in fact). If anything, the squaring-up to which Tintoretto's drawing has been subjected (part of the workshop process of readying a drawing for transfer to canvas) enhances this, providing a stable grid which makes the drawing's mobile, fluid character seem all the more apparent.

Likewise, to see Giacometti's Portrait of the Artist's Brother close to James Gillray's wonderful caricature Portrait of George Humphrey Jnr is to be made aware of possible links between two traditions - post-World War I School of Paris art and nineteenth-century English graphic satire - that are customarily regarded as entirely distinct from one another. Gillray's drawing is possessed by a maniacal energy which is only partially explained by a handwritten inscription in its corner asserting that ''This portrait was drawn by James Gillray on 11 June 1811, he being at that time insane.'' Gillray's odd, degenerate and yet somehow lithe scribblings, conjuring human form from a welter of scratched marks, might equally be seen as an extension of his better known style as a caricaturist - the result takes to its extreme that vision of man, as an absurd creature constantly on the verge of his own dissolution, that you find even in more controlled Gillrays. When you turn from this to Giacometti's portrait of his brother, you find another artist intent on creating a sense of human vulnerability, of man as a creature perpetually threatened by The Void, employing a not entirely dissimilar language of gesture: Diego Giacometti emerges from the paper as a grey ghost whose features are as much ravaged as defined by the slashing pencil strokes employed by the artist.

''The Primacy of Drawing'' is a risky exhibition to have mounted, because the thesis that lies behind such comparisons can easily be misread. It is tempting to find, in Petherbridge's unusual juxtapositions and in some of the assertions made in her catalogue, a somewhat foolhardy and anachronistic willingness to find ''modernity'' anywhere and everywhere in the graphic art of the past. Attempts to argue that, say, Raphael was ''really'' a modern artist are as tedious as they are foolish and usually deserve - like similar attempts in other fields such as Jan Kott's briefly fashionable book Shakespeare Our Contemporary, with its vision of The Bard as a proto-Pirandello - to be consigned to the dustbin of dubious scholarship.

Yet what Petherbridge appears to be arguing is not that Tintoretto was a Post- Impressionist avant la lettre, nor that Gillray was a proto-Existentialist (although a case of sorts could be made for the latter proposition), but rather that an awful lot of the formal and technical characteristics of modern art, usually billed as ''innovations'', are nothing of the kind.

This is not to say - the obverse of the argument that Raphael was ''really'' a modern artist - that Giacometti or Cezanne were ''really'' Old Masters. Instead, it is to argue that much of what accounts for the modernity of modern art is a question of emphasis, or intent, rather than a question of making marks in a radically new or original way. This, in turn, suggests an interesting possibility: that the history of art, which has been written substantially as a history of successive stylistic revolutions, is in fact no such thing. A multiplicity of styles and manners has always been present in Western art, and particularly Western drawing, since the Renaissance: what has changed has been the priority, or value, accorded to some rather than others. Cezanne, for example, imported that same sense of uncertainty found in his drawings into his works on canvas, whereas Tintoretto got rid of it.

''The idea that twentieth-century drawing is much freer, and somehow different in kind from that of other periods,'' notes Petherbridge, ''seems to fly in the face of the evidence.'' Support for this proposition comes in some fairly surprising forms in her exhibition. Claude Lorrain's studies from nature are extraordinary, using pen and wash to suggest scenes of atmospheric murkiness as disolved, as inchoate, as any Expressionist landscape. Nearby, there is a wonderful landscape drawing by the sixteenth-century German artist, Wolf Huber, whose rendering of vegetation as a series of wave-like whorls and coils, and whose attempts to paint wind, in his depiction of an empty sky activated by tiny flicks of the pen, seem to contain a remarkable portent of the graphic style of Van Gogh. Van Gogh, so long trumpeted as the great example of an artist whose style was produced, almost unconsciously, in response to terrible inner promptings, may have been rather more closely linked to the traditions of Northern landscape art than is commonly thought.

It remains an intriguing fact that such an exhibition would seem less convincing (although perhaps not that much less convincing, when you think of Titian, or of Velazquez) were it to be devoted to paintings. Perhaps Gauguin and Diderot did seize on some essential truth about the private, innately experimental nature of drawing as a medium; and perhaps Petherbridge has a point, when she advances what she calls her ''theory of compensation - that the greater the stylistic restrictions of painting, the more the artist has the need for experimentation and freedom in drawing''. The drawings of the Old Masters often seem particularly fascinating to the modern eye, because in them is preserved the evidence of that will to experimentation, to departure from accepted practice, which was often actively discouraged by the structures of patronage and studio procedure which they inherited. Maybe we find such drawings amazingly ''modern'' precisely because we inhabit an age where experiment, where newness and innovation, have become the prime desiderata of taste.