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Course: The J. Paul Getty Museum > Unit 2
Lesson 2: DrawingsDrawings
The Getty drawings department oversees a collection strong in old master works and and drawings from the 1800s and 1900s, including a Degas sketchbook. Created by Getty Museum.
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Video transcript
- [Voiceover] I find drawing
to be a very direct medium. You can see the artist thinking through, working through a compositional problem. It's the spontaneity, the lack of finish, the process-oriented character of drawings that attracts me to the medium. This is a drawing by Michelangelo, one of the great artists of all time, and one of the sort of titans
of the Italian Renaissance. It's a multi-figured composition that depicts Mary and Joseph on their rest in the flight into Egypt. The virgin, at once, pulls off her shawl in order to expose her breast for the Christ child to nurse. The child turns back in this very, very complicated movement to nurse backwards, exposing
this heroic musculature, that of course points to his divinity. The virgin is a mountainous figure, and I think in a symbolic way, meant to Michelangelo the kind of great power and protection of
the figure of the virgin. We tend to think about
drawing, for the most part, the standard idea is to think of it as a linear medium. Drawings are equated with line. But there are other
aspects of a work of art that artists can explore in drawing. For example, how they
actually lay on the paint, and I think this was a primary goal for Gainsborough in this drawing of a fashionable lady walking in the park. The chalk is laid down in
a very, very powdery way, so that we can feel these textures, we can see the gestures with which Gainsborough has applied them, but also not to be missed is
the coloristic aspect of it. Drawing is an extremely exploratory medium. It represents the thought
processes of the artist and it also represents a kind of exploratory attempt to find graphic expression for
one's creative ideas.