Word: guercino
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Italian Old Master Drawings from the Collection of Jeffrey E. Horvitz. Through Oct. 11. Thirty-eight Italian drawings ranging in date from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Among works featured are masterpieces by Giulio Romano, Guercino Casstiglione, Tiepolo, Salviate, Cnaletto and Guardi...
...fact, Guercino did not have Reni's breathtaking skill as a painter. But he was not afflicted by Reni's sentimentality either, and where he shone, as this compact and rewarding show makes clear, was in the act of drawing. By comparison with his preparatory drawings, Guercino's final paintings are quite often labored and stodgy. It is the drawings that contain his finest and most spontaneously registered perceptions, and fortunately many survive. George III, an avid collector, acquired nearly 350 of them, of which 60 are in the Drawing Center's show, and this can be only a fraction...
...doubt one's preference for Guercino's drawings over his paintings is partly caused by the modern liking for the immediate over the highly finished. Guercino liked the flicker of consciousness to show. In a famous passage, Leonardo da Vinci advised the painter to take inspiration from random pattern, like the mottled stains on an old wall; Guercino seems to have believed this too. One of the drawings in the show, Three Bathers Surprised by a Monster, starts with some random splatters of ink on the blank page; briskly and humorously, with a few minimal strokes, one of these blot...
...times there is something proleptically surrealistic about Guercino -- or is it only that the Surrealists picked up on some of the mannerisms Guercino shared with other Italian artists, the exaggerated perspectives, the distant figures? For whatever reasons, there is one drawing in the show -- a scarecrow large in the foreground, ominous birds, a tiny gesticulating woman -- that could have come straight out of the background of a Dali...
...mainstream of Guercino's graphic work was his studies for commissions. He worked in many media -- chalk, charcoal, crayon, pencil -- but his favorite was pen and ink wash, from which he produced brilliant summaries of movement, light and shade. The trace of the pen twists and flourishes, now with a liquid agitation, now in sheaves of parallel hatching as tense as wires. Nodes of darkness in a head or down the flank of a torso link up across the whiteness of the paper, and the fearlessness of tonal range attests to Guercino's mastery. He could work passages of light...