Word: draftsman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Born in Pittsburgh in 1924, Pearlstein gravitated to New York, where he rapidly became involved with the dominant orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism. But in 1958, after a visit to Italy, he began to realize that he was still at bottom a realist draftsman. "I did not mean to become the kind of naive or modest painter of nice pictures the word realist seems to lead people to expect. I meant to create strong, aggressive paintings that would compete with the best of abstraction...
...second-generation Abstract Expressionist like Pearlstein, Leslie turned to figure painting in the early '60s. His technique as a draftsman is formidable, sharing Pearlstein's plain speech and relentless grip. Your Kindness is an idiosyncratic companion piece to David's famous Death of Marat, with Leslie's wife Constance West dressed as Charlotte Corday and holding the letter that got her access to Marat's bathroom. It is an exhilarating picture, with its firm amplitude of shapes and stripes. Leslie thinks of his work in partly ethical terms. "I think," he reflects, "it was Balzac...
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...