Barnaby Fitzgerald

For there is one thing alone that is noble and that is fundamental to the question, and that is drawing: all other criteria are feeble in comparison to this one.

Jacopo Pontormo 1

Drawing is the probity of art.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres 2

Barnaby Fitzgerald’s drawings are mediations of the visual imagination within the confluence of present observation and the richness of the visual and the ekphrastic 3 traditions of representations. Throughout these works, a sense of repose, quietness, and delight in invention and the use of the materials of the medium is evident, not only in the motifs engaged, in the posture and gesture of the figures, but in the confidence and authority with which the work is undertaken. This confidence, no less than the content engaged and materials employed, positions these works within a domain of contemporary practice which recognizes its historicity as entailing continuity with a tradition of images and practices in which drawing is foundational to the artist’s enterprise. The foundational position of drawing obtains even when, as here, the drawings are autonomous works, notwithstanding whatever other purposes they may serve.

This would be less remarkable had not drawing, and particularly drawing which continues the central traditions of the medium, been marginalized in recent decades. When drawing as a studio practice continued to receive attention, it was frequently under the more general rubric of ‘works on paper’. 4 Concurrently, at some institutions, the role of drawing was sometimes vitiated in the curriculum, where its role in the education of the artist was long regarded as essential. 5

What may be predicated of the recent position of drawing may also be predicated of the motifs these drawings employ: the figure, and particularly the female figure, and indeed the female figure referencing baroque and rococo and neoclassical figures, often allegorical. 6 Within the modernist paradigm, characterized by reductivist essentialism in the service of a conception of the task of each medium to attain a state of purism, 7 these motifs were largely abandoned. To appeal to a notion of the postmodern as pluralist in explanation of this reappearance of modalities of representation long repressed is jejune and, in the end, begs the question. It is sufficient that they are again found capable of bearing meaning. Clearly the meanings the forms may now be found to bear are not precisely the meanings of their historical antecedents: the diachronic shift in context obviates that. As Heraclitus noted, “upon those who step into the same river different and different waters flow.” 8 Part of the content inherent in the present taking up of these motifs is this resonance with the historical antecedents of these works, a resonance between the here-and-now of observation, and the alterity of a there-and-then.

Photinia, and the life drawings Sitting, My Model and Mezzaluna are drawings from observation of the motif. At the same time, these drawings reference the set of practices in which they are positioned: drawings of details of nature, the practice of drawing from the model. As observational drawings, these are explorations of formal solutions and the development of an understanding of the possibilities the motif affords. This is to say that drawing is more than a mere recording of what is observed: the fixing of visual impressions in the static and significant forms of the drawing enables a cumulative knowledge of the motif to develop at the same time that knowledge finds its necessary formal and material resolution in the artwork. The pentimento at the figure’s right arm in Sitting is the visible trace of the process of finding that resolution. That resolution may be breathtaking: consider the virtuoso line defining the back of the figure in My Model, at once descriptive and astonishing in its elegance quite apart from its descriptive function. Or the delicacy of the washes in Photinia in juxtaposition with the confident refinement of the vigorous calligraphic pen strokes, precisely varying in line weight.

Simplification and lucidity characterize the classicizing monumental drawing Stoic. The figure is volumetric, solidly massive, executed with a directness and strength of mark befitting the scale. The figure in Stoic is developed in charcoal, with the middle values further worked in middle gray pastel, and with touches of white in the highlights. The pyramidal composition of Stoic conduces to a sense of stability, while the alertness of the gaze of the seated figure evokes a sense of centered composure (compare the gaze in the life drawing Sitting). The hands are relaxed, the feet solidly planted at rest on the floor plane, which is otherwise not differentiated from the dark painted area of sepia gradating to black from which the figure emerges. The ambiguous depth of the dark background contributes to the sense of volume in the lighter figure, which emerges from the ground as a compositional climax. 9 The syntactical shift from the painted mark of the background to the drawn mark of the figure contributes to this effect.

The smaller Lyre II is a variation on the same motif of a seated, draped female figure. Broad washes are used to block out the composition in values similar to the use of wash areas in Photinia, though in Lyre II the range of values is greater, and the dark background parallels that in Stoic. The sepia washes are warmer where thin and light in value, cooler where dense and darker in value, contributing to the opening of an envelope of space around the seated figure.The studies of female heads, Me? and Archaic Head, bridge a simplistic distinction of drawing and color. 10 The development of value and hue with gouache is in counterpoint to the use of ink for the crisp delineation of contour. The gesture of the hand in Me? forms a seemingly natural sign, while it is similar to the conventional form of a question mark.

Stealth and Stealth Too are developed studies of movement of an articulated cat skeleton, in silverpoint on prepared paper. The colored ground of the prepared paper provides the necessary tooth for the metal point, and defines the pictorial space, and serves as a tonal element in these drawings. 11 Since erasure is not practical with silverpoint, skill and clarity are essential. As smudging of the lines and significant variation of line weight is not possible, value is built up through parallel and cross-hatched lines. In Stealth Too, white is added to extend the value range. The careful, methodical development of value the medium requires conduces to the sense of calculation and precision in these drawings, which nevertheless are executed with a sensitivity obviating a mechanical effect.

Fitzgerald’s Pygmalion 12 depicts the legendary king of Cyprus as a youth creating the ivory statue with which he falls in love. Praying to Aphrodite to give him a wife resembling the statue, Pygmalion receives what he dared not ask for: Aphrodite gives the statue life, and Pygmalion marries her. As David Freedberg has noted, the myth subsumes both the desire that an image have liveliness and the fear that the image may come to life, the latter conflated with a fear of the body. 13

Sleeping Dryad references the dryads, or nymphs of trees, the life of the nymph being associated with that of the tree, ending when the tree died. Female personifications of objects of nature, the nymphs are traditionally represented as young and beautiful, usually gentle and fond of music and dancing, and long-lived albeit not immortal, though possessing some divine attributes, e.g., prophecy. In Sleeping Dryad, the figure rests in the branches of a tree.

T., like Sleeping Dryad, is a drawing of the reclining female figure. The drawing is developed in charcoal, with pentimenti visible at the upper delineating edge of the figure, at the left foot, and at the left hand. The hair at the cranium is drawn over with light gray pastel, which is also used to block in the foreground around the figure.

With their respective explorations of a common motif, the drawings Vain Mentality and Venus and Cupid, though autonomous works in themselves, may be regarded as studies preparatory to Mind Set, the single painting in the exhibition. Whether regarded as preliminary realizations of the visual idea of the painting Mind Set, or as autonomous works, Vain Mentality and Venus and Cupid are inventions within the conceptual and formal possibilities of the motif. These three works each involve mirror images: “Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.” 14 The mind as mirror is a perduring trope turning on the notion of reflection and presupposing that what is reflected is independent of the tain which reflects, and that a commensurable relation obtains between subject and object, interior and exterior. 15 Mind Set puns on the notion of a stage set and the doxa of a set mind, with the figure of Venus at toilet and two putti holding mirrors, the tableau resting on a platter on top of a female head, all of this mirrored within the virtual space of the painting by a mirror behind the figures, and by the painting itself as mirror of the painter’s mind mirroring the entities of the world. In Vain Mentality, two putti hold the mirror for Venus’ gaze, a precedent for the motif being Titian’s Venus With a Mirror. 16 The title 17 Vain Mentality suggests the vanity of self-reflection as misdirection of mentality: the mirror is traditionally an attribute of Venus, and one etymology derives Venus from the Latin vanus, ‘empty’, connected with vanitas. In 18 Venus and Cupid, Cupid holds the mirror (alluding, perhaps, to Velázquez’ ‘Rokeby’ Venus ), 19 while a putto in the foreground holds a platter of fruit, trope of abundance.

In these drawings, Barnaby Fitzgerald has provided a copious feast. To enumerate the iconography of the motifs Fitzgerald engages does not exhaust the works. It is precisely this nonexhaustion, after exhaustive enumeration of what is represented, that Arthur Danto has urged distinguishes artworks from mere representations:

The thesis is that works of art, in categorical contrast with mere representations, use the means of representation in a way that is not exhaustively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented. 20

A tradition exhausts itself by mythologizing the symbol; a tradition renews itself by means of interpretation, which transcends the slope from exhausted time to hidden time, that is, by soliciting from mythology the symbol and its store of meaning. 22

Barnaby Fitzgerald is Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Division of Art, Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. Fitzgerald received the Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1983, the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Boston University in 1977, and the Diploma de Magistero in printmaking from the Instituto Statale D’Arte, Urbino, Italy in 1973. Selected solo and group exhibitions include, 1995: Drawing to a Close, Valley House Gallery, Texas Realism With a Twist, Arlington Museum of Art, Paintings, Meredith Long Gallery, Houston, Gardens, Waco Museum of Art; 1992: Contemporary Paintings, Meredith Long Gallery, twenty five illustrations for Homer, The Odyssey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); 1991: Hughes-Trigg Gallery, Southern Methodist University; 1990: The Art Show, Seventh Regiment Armory, New York, American Figurative Painting, Meredith Long Gallery, Houston. He is represented by Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas.

1. Jacopo Pontormo, Letter to Benedetto Varchi, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, vol. III, ed. Paola Barocchi (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), pp. 504-507; trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, in eds. Eric Cochrane, Julius Kirshner, The Renaissance, vol. V, Readings in Western Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1986), pp. 270-273. RETURN
2. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, in Maurice Denis, Théories 1890-1910, “La Doctrine d’Ingres,” (Paris: Bibliothèque de l'Occident, 1912), pp.95-101; in ed. Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, A Documentary History of Art, v. III, From the Classicists to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 37. RETURN
3. I refer to the poetic genre of the verbal description of images. The Shield of Achilles passage in the Iliad (XVIII.424-616) may be taken as the ur-text of the genre; a developed and influential classical example is Philostratus’ Eikones, consisting of prose descriptions of pictures. More loosely, texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis may be regarded as having affinities with the genre insofar as it entails richly visual verbal descriptions of mythological events are entailed. For an analysis of the genre with a contemporary emphasis, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 109-181. See also James Heffernan’s “Ekphrasis and Representation,” New Literary History 22:2 (Spring 1991), pp. 297-316 and his The Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Of singular import to subsequent work on the genre is Murray Kreiger’s “The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Momemt of Poetry; or Laokoon Revisited,” in The Play and Place of Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967) and his later Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). RETURN
4. This was, of course, not universally the case: significant exhibitions of drawings continued, e.g. the excellent and wide-ranging exhibition Drawings curated by Henry Hopkins in 1969 for the Fort Worth Art Center Museum [now the Fort Worth Contemporary Art Museum], which itself marked a moment in the shift from ‘drawings’ to ‘works on paper’. It may be conceded that significant exhibitions of drawings have not been as frequent as the work deserves. RETURN
5. I hasten to stipulate this was not the case at all institutions. RETURN
6. On the postmodern return of allegory, see Craig Owen’s seminal “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 203-235. Fitzgerald’s use of the tradition is of course not unique; see the catalog to the exhibition curated by Karl Kilenski II, Classical Myth in Western Art: Ancient Through Modern (Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 1985). RETURN
7. While not the origin of the turn, Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting,” Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965), pp. 193-201 is a clearly formulated statement of the position:

   “It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered ‘pure’, and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as its independence. ‘Purity’ meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.”

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8. Heraclitus, Fr. 12; Arius Didymus ap. Eusebium, P. E. xv.20. Attested in Plato, Craytalus 402A; alluded to in Aristotle, Physics 253b9. RETURN
9. See William Vance Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 83ff. RETURN
10. Perhaps the contention between the rubénistes and poussinistes over the superiority of color or of drawing per- dures, but in different terms, shifted to the more general arena of image and text. The controversy between the rubénistes and poussinistes is rehearsed in Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). RETURN
11. An excellent technical treatise on the practical craft of metal point drawing (and other drawing media) is Jean Watrous, The Craft of Old Master Drawings (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967). RETURN
12. Ovid, Metamorphosis. X.243-297. RETURN
13. See David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 340-344. RETURN
14. William Butler Yeats, “The Statues,” line 24. In ed. M. L. Rosenthal, Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 175. RETURN
15. See, inter alia, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Fot the concept of the tain of a mirror, and the metaphor of reflection, see Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). RETURN
16. Tiziano Vecelli, Venus With a Mirror, c. 1555, 49 x 41.5, Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. RETURN
17. On the functions of titles, see Hazard Adams, "Titles, Titling, and Entitlement To," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46:1 (Fall 1987), 7-21. RETURN
18. Other suggested etymologies for Venus, more generally accepted, include veneris, ‘desire, grace, charm, sexual love’; venia, ‘grace or favor of the gods’, and venerum, ‘drug, philtre, charm’. RETURN
19. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Veláquez, The Toilet of Venus (The ‘Rokeby’ Venus) 1651, National Gallery, London. RETURN
20. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp.147-148. RETURN
21. By ‘historical consciousness’ I mean a recognition of alterity; see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as play, symbol, and festival,” The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 3-53. RETURN
22. Raul Ricoeur, “Structure and Hermeneutics,” The Conflict of Interpretatins: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 29. Cf. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood (London: Metheun, 1920), pp. 198-199. RETURN