Word: draftsman
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Another artist who seems to incorporate photographic principles is the Italian master draftsman. Alberto Giacometti. Giacometti's portraits appear layered; white lines contouring a head on a dark background seem to be a stack of negatives. Naum Gabo also emphasizes space, but he works with three-dimensional materials. By winding strings around transparent plastic, he defines an ellipsoid within a rectangular boundary. As Picasso took the viewer through space with uncanny juxtapositions of his subject's position. Gabo constructs his space by pulling us into the elliptical void as well as asking us to follow the contours formed...
Bacon's figures, in their blurred, spastic postures, relate to the work of early still photographers like Eadweard Muybridge, or art reproductions, movie stills, news flashes. Personality, existence itself, glints like a fish in dark water and is gone. Bacon is a singular draftsman, but his drawing has practically no descriptive function-it serves, instead, to tally a sum of distortions...
...French to be slighted when it comes to printmaking. Nicolas Poussin, Edouard Manet, and Ingres point out the diversity of techniques within any nation of artists. Ingres, a noted draftsman, excels even the Dutch in precision of detail. Poussin still tells classic and mythological narratives (The Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs), but Manet, one of the fathers of Impressionism concerned with the science of how the eye saw, sketches a woman, flattened, on photographic paper, perhaps borrowed from the great French photographer of the time, Nadar, whose studio housed the first Salon des Impressionistes...
Such etchings sold, and thus encouraged, Hopper began to paint oils again and experiment with watercolors. He was also drawing from the nude at the Whitney Studio Club in Manhattan. The works of this period show he was a good draftsman who could depict a naked woman with an earthy sensuousness that Renoir might have approved. In the early '20s on a trip back to the New York School of Art, he became interested in Art Student Josephine Verstille Nivison, a small, vivid, thirtyish woman whose volubility and quick wit were the exact opposite of Hopper's quiet...
...painter, he held, "prefers to beautify." But the draftsman, who works with the more wiry stuff of line, "practices a form of criticism with his scratching." The man with the pen "looks perpetually at the unfilled holes, the yearned for and the barely attainable; his is a personal coming to terms with a world of irreconcilable powers. The painter bodies forth optimism ... the draftsman cannot escape his more negative vision, beyond appearances." So Klinger the painter moved sedately between a professorship in Leipzig and his country vineyard, turning out the portraits and allegories his patrons sought, and ignoring the obsessions...