The focus of this powerful drawing is not Boucher’s model but the yards of voluminous cloth enveloping her, resulting in a study that approaches abstraction. The artist used black chalk to create an outline and shadows, white chalk to produce shimmering highlights, and buff-colored paper to suggest flesh and give the fabric color and volume. The figure’s carefully considered pose is graceful yet monumental, delineating a semicircle with her upper body and arms. The study may have served as the model for Cleopatra in Boucher’s etched frontispiece for an edition of the French playwright Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Rodogune: Princess of Parthia.

Ballet dancers were a central theme of Degas’s oeuvre beginning in the 1870s; to him, the art form uniquely embodied both classical grace and modern realism. The artist—who once self- deprecatingly said, “My chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes”—adopted a more formal approach to the figure in his later years. On this sheet, visible erasures show Degas's process as he subtly shifted the positions of the two models, who appear to be adjusting invisible bodices.

This woman is one of two in Matisse’s painting La musique, which he also completed in 1939. Though called a study, the drawing was an exercise in invention and variation, a way for Matisse to organize his thoughts and clarify his means before returning to the painting. There is a tactile quality to Matisse’s exploration, seen in the velvety charcoal deposits within the dark outline of the model’s features, her softly smudged skin and hair, and the brilliant areas of white left to describe her dress.

In 1941, while convalescing from a serious illness, Matisse devised a fresh approach to his interest in repeated motifs: a drawing series that he would publish in 1943 as Themes and Variations. Comprising 162 drawings organized into 17 groups, the series mostly depicts female figures reclining or relaxing in chairs. This example is characterized by the contrasts of charcoal and paper and of flatness and depth, as well as by its fluid, energetic line. Other studies in Themes and Variations use a much cleaner line to render their subject. As a whole, the series demonstrates the artist’s commitment to capturing a drawing’s essence through serial reworking.

Carracci drew this resting Hercules while preparing a fresco cycle for Cardinal Odoardo Farnese’s private study in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. The mythical Roman hero is identified by his club, a lion’s hide, and the apple in his right hand. Though lifelike, the figure was not drawn from a live model. Instead, it was inspired by works that Carracci, a recent transplant from Bologna, encountered in Rome, such as an ancient sculpture of the reclining Roman river god Tiber. The drawing is executed on blue paper, which creates a middle tone between the black chalk shadows and white chalk highlights, endowing Hercules with a greater degree of volume and naturalism.

The bearded artist in this drawing is Picasso’s avatar, while the recumbent nude resembles his then-lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Watercolor covers much of the sheet, but the model’s body has been left suggestively white, as if to conflate her with the classical statuary that inspired Picasso’s work at the time.

Between 1950 and 1953, de Kooning created a series of paintings and drawings depicting exaggerated, even grotesque, women. In Two Women I, the figures emerge from a field of abstract marks and erasures, underscoring the artist’s dual commitment to abstraction and figuration at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the prevailing artistic movement in the United States. The women are arrayed frontally, one with her arms raised behind her head in likely reference to Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). The figures’ large eyes and breasts recall Paleolithic fertility sculptures, attesting to the longevity of the female nude as a subject in art.

Van Gogh seems to have been inspired to make this melancholy drawing after reading “Tristement” (Sadly) by the French writer François Coppée, known as “the Poet of the Humble.” The poem describes a mourning widow proceeding along “a very long lane of giant, half- denuded plane trees.” Time has enhanced the drawing’s autumnal mood. The irongall ink that Van Gogh used, once black, has faded to a dark brown and imparted a golden tone to the paper, and the hatched pen lines have bled and merged. The effect overall is a more muted contrast between light and dark.

This haunting work belongs to a remarkable body of landscapes that Seurat drew in the early 1880s. A lone figure moves along a path through a park setting with hilly terrain, tended lawns, and tall trees. Seurat applied Conté crayon with varying pressure to the textured paper, creating luminous middle tones counterpoised with solid blacks. With its mysterious, twilit atmosphere, Landscape demonstrates the artist’s unique tenebrist style—characterized by contrasting shadows and dramatic illumination—which he would develop throughout the decade.

In the 1940s, Kline developed a distinctive abstract idiom consisting of wide, gestural strokes in black and white. This sheet, titled Chicago in reminiscence of a trip the artist took in 1957, is not a cityscape but a study in contrast and motion. Although the composition is dominated by dense concentrations of black ink, visible brushstrokes denote movement. Kline’s application of white paint—both directly on the paper and over black ink—heightens the sense of opposing forces meeting on the page. Kline once said, “The final test of a painting . . . Is: does the painter’s emotion come across?”

An example of Porta’s mature draftsmanship, this drawing demonstrates a range of techniques, from the carefully modeled face and crumpled sleeve pleats to the delicate strokes describing the figure’s beard. The artist achieved rich and vibrant color effects by employing four different chalks against blue-gray paper. The sheet served as a preparatory study for a fresco in the Sala Regia—a formal reception hall in the Vatican—that was executed between 1562 and 1566. The corresponding painted figure, who gestures emphatically while conferring with an armored warrior standing nearby, can be seen in the large crowd at right.

One of Veronese’s first independent commissions in Venice was a very large canvas depicting Saint Mark, the city’s patron saint, crowning female personifications of Christian theological virtues—Faith, Hope, and Charity. This drawing is a preparatory study for the figure of Faith. She is rendered as if seen from below, with her left hand raised and her head turned skyward, creating a powerful impression of upward movement. The study is Veronese’s earliest known drawing in black chalk, which he methodically applied using regular, evenly spaced hatching. Now in the collection of the Louvre, the painting once adorned the ceiling of the Hall of the Compass in the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

At once strikingly naturalistic and elegantly stylized, this drawing is a brilliant example of Florentine draftsmanship in the late sixteenth century. The carefully posed serpentine figure, whose elongated arms are arranged as if to hold an invisible musical instrument, is probably a studio model or garzone

Born in Calabria in southern Italy, Preti spent his most formative years in Rome and Naples, absorbing artistic influences and developing an exuberant late-Baroque painting style. This drawing, made in preparation for a major altarpiece commission for the Church of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori in Naples, is one of very few compositional studies by the artist known today. The muscular protagonist bound to a tree by his tormentors is Saint Sebastian, a Roman imperial guard condemned to death for his Christian faith. Although at first glance the saint’s body appears uninjured, a closer look reveals the arrows—faintly rendered in red chalk—piercing his torso and arms.

Using only black and white chalk to convey flesh tones, Lemoyne convincingly depicted the hero Hercules in full swing—much like a baseball player at bat. One of two known studies for the figure in Lemoyne’s painting Hercules Clubbing Cacus, this sheet powerfully conveys the artist’s graphic skill. The painting illustrates Hercules’s tenth labor, in which the hero endeavors to bring the monster Geryon’s cattle back to Rome. Upon discovering that the giant Cacus has

Produced in the early years of Guercino’s career, this study relates to a now- lost fresco that once adorned the façade of the Palazzo Tanari in Bologna. In contrast to the drawing by Lemoyne on view nearby, here we encounter the mythical hero Hercules pensively leaning on his club, at rest after a battle. His left foot is placed on the Hydra, the multiheaded serpentine monster that he has just defeated. Guercino’s delicate, spidery pen lines have an exploratory quality, while the heavy brown wash is used to convey strong chiaroscuro effects, defining and highlighting individual forms.

Van den Eeckhout was one of Rembrandt’s most successful pupils. This drawing belongs to a group of related studies—some of the most outstanding figure drawings produced in seventeenth-century Holland—characterized by a contemplative mood and an economical rendering. The bearded figure was executed almost entirely with a brush and brown wash applied in broad, energetic strokes. The artist seems to have been particularly interested in describing the stark interplay of light and shade, exemplified by the man’s face. Although the figure was probably not observed from life, he has an intense, brooding presence.

Salviati’s many surviving drawings reflect his fecund imagination, technical proficiency, and stylistic flair. This sheet is notable for its skillful application of brown wash, including thick strokes, quick accents, and sinuous contours. The artist’s bravura graphic performance is matched by his playful interpretation of the subject: a soldier in a quasiballetic pose. The young man balances on one foot while gingerly lifting a curtain, whose volume and heft Salviati has conveyed through masterfully modulated brown wash. Unconnected to any of the artist’s known projects, this large, highly finished drawing was likely intended to function as an independent work of art.

In the 1870s, Cézanne took up the subject of bathers, an interest that persisted until the end of his career. The artist did not use live models. His impetus was more conceptual than naturalistic, and he approached figure study above all as an exercise in formal composition. This drawing comes from a group of studies and paintings that feature a single male bather with one arm rigidly outstretched. The figure’s unconventional pose was inspired by an ancient Roman sculpture of a dancing satyr in the Louvre. Cézanne’s staccato lines, while seemingly quick and spontaneous, were in fact applied carefully and methodically as he slowly explored his subject, endowing his bather with a monumentality that belies the drawing’s modest dimensions.

Ancient sculpture, which Rubens studied during histwo stays in Rome, significantly shaped his artisticpractice. He believed that to achieve mastery of painting, it was crucial to understand ancient art, and “to be so thoroughly possessed of this knowledge that it may diffuse itself everywhere.” In this drawing, Rubens arranged a studio model in a pose derived from the Hellenistic bronze known as the Spinario, which shows a boy removing a thorn from the sole of his foot. Closely following an ancient example yet based on a live model, the drawing demonstrates Rubens’s conviction that art should respond to older works but ultimately imitate nature.

Picasso created this drawing while observing rehearsals of the Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo. His association with the itinerant ballet company began in 1917, when he designed sets and costumes for Parade. Represented in abbreviated yet remarkably descriptive lines, the languorous dark- haired dancer at the barre has been identified as Serge Lifar, while the seated blond man is probably a Ukrainian dancer known as Khoer. Picasso concealed an earlier version of Lifar’s right leg with extensive crosshatching between the two figures.

In the final months of 1906, Picasso made several studies of female nudes with deeply cut, almondshaped eyes and ovoid heads. The drawings were inspired by ancient Spanish (Iberian) sculptures that he had seen in the Louvre in Paris, and they reflect the artist’s attempt to transcend the traditional academic nude in his search for a more archetypal form. In this example, Picasso rapidly sketched his figure full-length and frontally, also including a study of her head in profile. The choppy, staccato graphic language was influenced by Paul Cézanne, whom Picasso called his “one and only master” (see Cézanne’s Bather with Outstretched Arms elsewhere in the exhibition).

Rodin was a prolific draftsman who, especially in his later years, made thousands of drawings of nude models in his studio. Energetic and fluid, they record unexpected poses and unusual viewpoints that depart from established European art- historical precedents. A contemporary described Rodin’s method: “Equipped with a sheet of paper . . . And a graphite pencil . . . He gets his model to strike a more or less unstable pose, then draws quickly without taking his eyes off the model. The hand roams haphazardly, the pencil often runs off the page. . . . Not once does [he] look at it. This snapshot of movement is taken in less than a minute.”

Dubuffet sought to replicate the immediacy of the art of the untutored. In this sheet, he incised four figures into a ground of opaque watercolor, exposing the sandpaper he used as a support. The technique shares more with graffiti and the scrawls of children than with academic drawing. The artist once remarked, “When I say draw I’m not to the slightest degree thinking of faithfully reproducing objects . . . . No, it’s a matter of something quite different: to animate the paper, to make it palpitate.”

This moving portrait of an older man was made in northern Italy, probably in the 1490s. The man’s pensive gaze suggests an introspective mood. His unshaven chin, wrinkled flesh, sunken cheeks and eyes, and thinning hair are rendered attentively, with uncompromising naturalism—evidence of the artist’s earnest inquiry into the aging process. The skillful application of charcoal—which ranges from bold, velvety lines to very light hatches, blended with a stump and brush—creates a convincing impression of plasticity and volume.

Daumier’s wiry pen-and-ink lines aptly, and mercilessly, describe the creases on his subjects’ weary faces. This sheet appears to relate to a series of watercolors featuring bourgeois gentlemen that the artist produced for sale to collectors in the 1860s, after he was temporarily let go from the satirical French daily Le Charivari. Daumier drew constantly, often adding faces in the margins of sheets as he did here. The face to the right of the inscription at bottom is thought to represent the artist himself.

The heroic sun god Apollo drives his four- horse chariot while Aurora, goddess of the dawn, strews flowers in his path, announcing his—and the new day’s—arrival. Orsi’s drawing is a final preparatory sketch for an illusionistic fresco (now lost) that once adorned the clock tower in the northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia. Orsi was so successful in suggesting the god’s powerful forward motion that Apollo looks as if he might fly from his chariot and out of the picture frame. The design was meant to be seen from below, which explains the slightly distorted perspective.

As narrated in the New Testament, Saul of Tarsus, a ruthless persecutor of Christians, was struck from his horse by the blinding light of a divine apparition on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus. In this large, elaborate study for an altarpiece in the Basilica di San Francesco in Bologna, Lodovico emphasized the centrifugal drama of the event by crowding the picture plane with a seething mass of human and equine forms. The artist’s bold, painterly technique—combining pen and ink, washes, and white oil paint—allowed him to achieve the spectacular contrasts of light and dark that often characterize his paintings.

The election of Oddone Colonna as Pope Martin V in 1417 ended the Western Schism, during which multiple parties had claimed the papal title. In this drawing, Colonna is depicted receiving the keys of Saint Peter—the traditional symbol of papal authority—from a female figure kneeling before him. To her right, the figure riding a lion and holding a column personifies the Colonna family, whose coat of arms featured a column (colonna in Italian). Highly theatrical and emotionally expressive, the drawing epitomizes late-Baroque virtuoso design and draftsmanship.

Born into a family of Parisian painters, Vouet spent his early career in Rome working for aristocratic and ecclesiastical patrons. Although he was involved in many painting commissions during those years, few drawings seem to have survived; Kneeling angel may be one of his rare Roman sheets. The robust yet elegant angel is characteristic of Vouet’s early style, with its combination of black and white chalk and the careful description of light and shadow on the drapery folds. The study relates to a chapel vault decoration, featuring musical angels, that the artist painted in the Roman church of San Lorenzo in Lucina.

A prolific designer of book illustrations, Rubens considered such work a relaxing activity for Sundays and religious holidays, as a break from his painting commissions and diplomatic duties. He drew this preparatory study for an engraving that would accompany a 1614 edition of the Breviarium Romanum (Roman Breviary), a liturgical book used by Catholic clergy during Mass. In Rubens’s unusual interpretation of the Last Supper scene, a dignified Christ appears in profile and at the side of the composition. Of the twelve disciples in his company, the treacherous Judas has been placed most prominently at center. The verticality of the image, chosen to accommodate the book’s dimensions, gives the impression of a lofty interior, with the assembled figures compressed in the lower half of the sheet.

This sheet is a study for an unrealized painting commissioned by Charles Marcotte, Rome’s inspector general of waterways and forests and a great friend of Ingres’s. It depicts Santa Maria Maggiore’s Borghese (Pauline) Chapel, viewed from the church’s nave, during a devotional rite called the Quarantore that involves forty hours of continuous prayer. Although figures are scattered throughout the composition, the artist imbued the scene with a sense of calm and stillness, emphasizing architectural symmetry and the interplay of light and shadow.

One of Ingres’s largest and most ambitious portrait drawings, this work depicts the Parisian society hostess, writer, and critic the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult and her daughter Claire. Ingres typically produced his portrait drawings without preparation and in a single sitting. This work, in contrast, required at least two sittings and three preparatory studies. The drawing is notable for its evocation of the richly furnished interior of d’Agoult’s home. The artist selectively applied yellow watercolor to enhance objects and added white heightening to the sitters’ dresses to suggest the sheen of silk.

Léger exemplified the “return to order,” the classicizing impulse that emerged in the arts after World War I. In his paintings and drawings, he simultaneously looked back to the harmony of classicism—as embodied in the drawings of Jean- Auguste- Dominique Ingres—and forward to the technological progress and rationalism promised by the industrial order. Even his human subjects, as seen here, take on the appearance of machines. The three women have perfectly spherical heads and breasts and cylindrical necks, while their skirts suggest the fluting of classical columns.

This sheet is an example of frottage, a method of creating a design by rubbing pencil over paper laid on a textured surface. By using this technique, Ernst surrendered some control, thus expanding the possibilities of his art. The border of Fruits, with its softly rendered wood grain pattern, is a classic example of the method. The central still life, however—turned on its axis and appearing to float in space—has a compositional clarity that is difficult to achieve with frottage.

With quick, spidery lines in pen and ink, Vasari vivified Saint Paul’s heavenly vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. The artist’s approach to the biblical scene—particularly the close- cropped, horizontal format—differs notably from that of Lodovico Carracci, whose Conversion of Saint Paul appears elsewhere in the exhibition. This sketchwas a preparatory drawing for one of three frescoes that Vasari designed for a church ceiling vault in the central Italian town of Cortona. The paint stainson the right- hand side suggest that the drawing was used during the painting process.

Many of Oldenburg’s motifs come from childhood interests. The typewriter eraser is one such example, recalling a period when he played at being a journalist in his father’s home office. The subject is also in keeping with his general attraction to ordinary household items and consumer products. Oldenburg first introduced the typewriter eraser into his work in 1970, and it continued to inspire drawings, prints, and sculptures for nearly three decades. In this sheet, the artist animated—and even anthropomorphized—his humble subject with lively, seemingly spontaneous marks.

Amid a wooded landscape strewn with ancient monuments and human and animal skulls, two men and a youth ponder the state of the world. The men are Democritus and Heraclitus, ancient Greek thinkers who represent opposing temperaments and philosophical perspectives. Democritus, “the Laughing Philosopher,” found amusement in human follies, while Heraclitus was a loner and misanthrope, earning the epithet “the Weeping Philosopher.” Tiepolo created this luminous scene by layering brown washes of different intensities and leaving areas of paper untouched to serve as highlights.

Between 1797 and his death in 1804, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo—the son of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, whose work is on view nearby—created 104 inventive wash drawings for his series Divertimenti per li ragazzi (Diversions for Children). The drawings illustrate the life of the tragicomic commedia dell’arte figure Punchinello (identified by his white garments, conical hat, and beaked mask), a popular protagonist in Italian theater and puppetry starting in the 1600s. Punchinello collapses on the road takes place just before the protagonist’s death. Having suffered a fall, he is surrounded by eleven concerned companions and three lamenting women. While the Divertimenti presents Punchinello as a kind of everyman, Tiepolo also frequently referenced the life of Christ. This drawing recalls the scene of Christ falling as he carries the cross.

Divided into three distinct scenes, this composition focuses on the events following Christ’s Crucifixion. At center, a large group of followers mourns over his slumped, dead body. Christ’s tomb is prepared for his burial at left, and the bodies of the two thieves who were crucified alongside him are carried away at upper right. The drawing typifies Polidoro’s work in pen and ink, featuring reduced forms composed of agitated strokes and rapid hatching.

The shifting forms and colors in this watercolor surge forward and recede, forming a completely abstract panorama at first glance. Further examination reveals hints of a landscape, however, including a hilltop town illuminated by a deep-red sun over a tower at upper left. Forced by World War I to leave Germany, where he had lived since 1898, Kandinsky returned to Moscow in 1914. There, restricted by limited space and financial resources, he concentrated on small- scale works primarily in watercolor, such as this one.

A native of Venice, Canaletto specialized in charmingly descriptive views of the city, which were highly sought after by European aristocrats traveling to Italy on the Grand Tour. This carefully structured landscape places the viewer amid a busy market at the Molo, a pier adjacent to the Doge’s Palace, seen at left. The meticulously described architectural features of the palace contrast with the calligraphic, somewhat abstracted rendering of figures populating the foreground. The drawing exemplifies Canaletto’s late work in its combination of brown ink and gray wash and his use of the paper’s white reserves to evoke sunlight playing over masonry.

The Swedish draftsman and sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel trained with Pierre-Hubert L’Archevêque, a French artist active at the royal court in Stockholm. Later, Sergel spent several months studying at the Royal Academy in Paris. This early drawing reveals his resultant debt to French art, especially the light and sinuous graphic style of François Boucher (whose work appears elsewhere in the exhibition). The ambitious, highly theatrical composition illustrates a scene from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. Seated at right, Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek army laying siege to Troy, agrees to return the abducted daughter of the Trojan priest Chryses, demanding in exchange Achilles’s favorite concubine. Furious at the idea, Achilles, seen at left, draws his sword but is held back by the apparition of the goddess Athena.

This large, bold drawing was part of David’s preparatory work for The Intervention of the Sabine Women. In the legendary origin story of ancient Rome, the city’s founder Romulus and his men abducted women from the neighboring Sabine tribe, forcing them into marriage. When the vengeful Sabines declared war on the Romans, Romulus’s wife and the other Sabine women threw themselves and their infants between the two armies and successfully stopped a war. David conceived of the painting while in prison for his active involvement in the French Revolution and allegiance to Maximilien Robespierre, one of its principal leaders. The subject allowed him to deliver a powerful postrevolutionary message of political and familial reconciliation.

In drawings, prints, and paintings produced throughout his career, Goltzius often returned to images of ancient warriors and mythical heroes. Despite its relatively small size, this study of a helmeted figure in an antique- inspired military costume captures the feeling of heroic grandeur that the artist aimed to achieve in such works. Goltzius’s drawing style is fluid and loose, suggesting confident and speedy execution. He strategically placed touches of red chalk to describe the warrior’s skin tone, adding a painterly flourish to the image.

In the 1990s, Lichtenstein created a body of work called Interiors, in which he mixed references to classical antiquity, the Renaissance, and modernism. He also used visual signs plucked from his own illustrious career, such as his characteristic Ben-Day dots. Created in the last year of Lichtenstein’s life, this drawing is a study for a painting commissioned by the fashion designer Gianni Versace. A confusedlooking Ajax, a hero of Greek mythology, finds himself in an eclectically decorated room in which styles float free of their contexts and hatch marks are divorced from their descriptive function.

A candle in hand, crowned with a halo of light, the winged personification of eternity sits astride a globe in the celestial sphere. Vasari enhanced the drawing’s luminosity with his virtuosic technique, overlaying discrete yet tightly packed strokes of white opaque watercolor on blue paper. The artist made the drawing for a ceiling fresco decorating the refectory of the monastery church of Monteoliveto in Naples. The study is typical of the allegorical imagery that Vasari developed in the early 1540s and to which he would return throughout his career.

The drawn forms in Miró’s Untitled—a conical, tipped weather vane, planets and comets in orbit, and a flaming horizon line—are schematically rendered yet recognizable. They float amid an abstract landscape of paper- collage circles in rust, brown, tan, and white. Untitled is one of twenty- two large- scale, chromatically austere collages Miró made between July and November 1929. In these works, he kept his drawn lines to a minimum. Miró described his collages as “drawings with new explorations into substance” and as “training exercises, shadowboxing, so as to hit harder and harder, in a tougher and more energetic way.”