Morgan's New Riches

By ROBERT HUGHES

Every kind of art collecting, from medieval ivories to Matisses, is always assumed to have had its golden age, a time when marvelous things were plentiful, and almost cheap. By definition, that age is always gone.

Nowhere does this folk wisdom seem truer than in the field of master drawings. The springs have certainly dwindled. Fifty years ago, the appearance on the auction block of a sheet by one of the great father figures of 15th and 16th century drawing--Duerer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo--was not uncommon. Today one would hardly be more surprised if a live dodo waddled into the Parke-Bernet auction room. Drawings also are not a young man's hobby; they demand a degree of patient connoisseurship (tinged with philatelic mania) that only the old usually have. But late last month a remarkable disproof of the rule went on show at Manhattan's Pierpont Morgan Library: a group of 115 works from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene V. Thaw.

Thaw, 47, is probably the most successful private art dealer of his generation. His special interest as a collector, however, is master drawings, which he began to buy in the early '50s. The whole collection--including numerous works by Era Bartolomeo, Rembrandt, the Tiepolos, Rubens, Claude, Watteau, Goya, Degas and Cezanne--is to be given to the Morgan Library, and this is its first public viewing. Through 1976 it will be seen, after the Morgan showing, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Canada.

The show is not, and could not pretend to be, a history or compendium of drawing. As a collector, Thaw admits his bigotries, and one of them is antipathy to Italian baroque. But in his favorite areas, particularly the 19th century, an exquisitely sure taste has been at work. One would have to go some distance before finding drawings as good as Cezanne's big study of a card player, in which the pencil strokes endow every plane of flesh and fold of cloth with the crystalline solidity of gray limestone; or Daumier's brace of lawyers, whispering together like upholstered vultures.

The pleasure of looking at drawings has something in common with voyeurism. It lies in the feeling that one is privy to an artist's thought. This is perhaps an illusion, since the processes of hand and mind that conspire to make a great drawing are no less elusive than those that make a painting. Yet, the fact remains, drawings may seem more revealing just because they are less "finished." Traditionally, a painting is a rounded utterance, decisive and final in every particular. But to see how that speech was constructed, one turns to the drawings and studies. Here is Rembrandt, in The Finding of Moses (one of half a dozen

Rembrandts in the collection), beginning to array his whole cast of characters by the river bank, setting them down in the hooked squiggles and blots of a reed pen -- pure calligraphy, astounding in its vigor. Here is Watteau, constructing with red and black chalk an exact equivalent of the shimmer of light over flesh, muslin and stiff satin that so gripped him in painting.

Here is Tiepolo's delight in wide, airy high space working as effectively in a brisk pen-and-wash sketch as on a Venetian ceiling.

The connections are of imagery as well as of hand writing. An essential, indeed an obsessive, side of Goya is disclosed in the drawings on show by that master: blind beggars, stumpy as turnips, caterwauling for alms in the street; an old woman mumbling to her cat; a man in a clownish cap behind a railing, staring from the page with a dreadful mixture of rhetoric and solipsism, entitled simply Lecura -- madness. To see Delacroix's watercolor sketch of a tiger, lying on some imaginary ridge in Algeria with the ripples of its striped back imitating the profile of mountains in the background, is to be reminded how that animal -- an embodiment of natural force to the Romantics -- was for Delacroix akin to a self-portrait.

Over and over, this show makes the point that drawing is not a slight activity, that small scale can concentrate the presence of an image, just as large scale can expand it. As the Morgan Library moves into its second half-century as a public institution, one could hardly wish it a more delectable present than the Thaw collection.

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