Pushing paper contemporary drawing from 1970 to now @ the British Museum

‘Learn to draw, learn to see.’
(Established artist Eugène Boudin to the up-and-coming young Monet)

A travelling show

The British Museum houses the national collection of Western prints and drawings, in the same way as the National Gallery and Tate hold the national collection of paintings. It is one of the top three collections of its kind in the world, and houses approximately 50,000 drawings and over two million prints dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century up to the present day.

Of these 50,000 drawings, some 1,500 are by contemporary or modern artists. From this 1,500, the museum has worked with curators from other galleries around the country to make a selection of 56 drawings for this exhibition, which:

  1. highlight the range and diversity of contemporary drawings
  2. are designed to show how the entire concept of ‘drawing’ has been subjected to radical experiments and redefinitions during this key period, 1970 to the present

The idea is that after a couple of months on display in London, the exhibition will travel to the partner museums around the country, which will add works from their own collections to the display, thus creating a unique combination at each venue.

You can see how this will a) make the works accessible to audiences round the country and b) create a network of curators who are interested and informed about drawings, which could lead to who knows what consequences in the future.

What is a drawing?

Here’s one of the first works you encounter, Untitled by Grayson Perry, featuring an early outing by his transvestite alter-ego, Clare (note what seems to be a dog’s tail coming out the back of her skirt). So far, so gender-bending.

What’s really going on here, though, is the extreme stress Perry is applying to the concept of the ‘drawing’. It clearly contains elements of collage, with stereotypical photos from magazines tacked onto it, plus the diagonal colour washes and diagonal bands of glitter. Is it a drawing at all?

Untitled (1984) by Grayson Perry © The Trustees of the British Museum

That is the question which echoes through the rest of the show. Some works are old-style figurative depictions of some real object in the world, for example this attractive portrait by Jan Vanriet (although I was a little puzzled whether this was a drawing or a watercolour. Is it a drawing which has been watercoloured? Is that still a drawing?)

Ruchla by Jan Vanriet (2011) © The Trustees of the British Museum

It turns out to be one of a series developed from portrait photos of the Jews deported from one particular location in Belgium to concentration camps where they were all murdered. Kind of changes your attitude to the image, doesn’t it?

Drawing also contains the genre of satire or caricature or political cartoon, here represented by Philip Guston‘s unforgiving image of American president Richard Nixon, whose face seems to have turned into a penis and scrotum. To his left what I initially thought was his body is in fact a caricature of Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was addicted to playing golf, hence the clutter of golf clubs and balls. And the crab-like glasses on the right reference Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger.

Untitled by Philip Guston (1971) © The Trustees of the British Museum

(This caricature is a reminder to younger viewers that there’s nothing new about Donald Trump: America has a long, long, long track record of scumbag, murdering, lying presidents. Why, then, do the arbiters of culture give America so much weight and respect?)

And then there are what you could call artistic ‘deformations’ of real objects, specifically the human body, subjected to stylisation, morphing into abstract patterns, as in this drawing by Gwen Hardie, the tiggerish striping of the torso counterpointed by the stylisation of what are presumably female sex organs, the leaning-back posture a cross between a cave painting and a Henry Moore sculpture. Gwen is a woman artist ‘who has a longstanding preoccupation with the body and its perception’.

Untitled (1962) by Gwen Hardie © The Trustees of the British Museum

A striking ‘deformation of the actual’ is this work by Hew Locke, a British artist of Guyanese descent. According to the wall label, Locke takes the view that the Queen has been party to countless secrets during her record-breaking reign, and that this nightmarish image captures the corroding and corrupting effect all these secrets and lies have had on her, by the look of it, transforming her face into a mask of eyes against a backdrop of scores of little wiggly lime-green skulls. The image ‘asks us to question the Queen as a symbol of nationhood , as well as the power and history which she embodies.’

Sovereign 3 by Hew Locke (2005) © The Trustees of the British Museum

For those of us who were around during the punk Summer of Hate of 1977 – 42 years ago – this is nothing new. Taking the piss out of the Queen is an extremely old activity, in fact it made me feel quite nostalgic.

Sex Pistols album cover (1977)

According to the curators, the period from 1970 to the present saw a resurgence of interest in drawing. Previously it had mostly been seen as a format in which you practiced life studies, or prepared for work in a more demanding medium such as painting. The 1960s opened the box on this (as on so many other genres and practices) and freed up artists to be as playful and experimental as they could imagine. Thus:

Drawings in the exhibition encroach on territories traditionally associated with mediums including sculpture, land art and even performance.

‘Drawing’ spills out all over the place.

Five themes

The exhibition groups the works into five themes, ‘examining’:

  • Identity
  • Place and Space
  • Time and Memory
  • Power and Protest
  • Systems and Process

Personally, I felt these ‘themes’ rather limited and directed and forced your responses to works which often had nothing at all in common, and could each have stood by themselves. Except for the last one, that is: because a lot of the works genuinely are interested in systems and processes.

For example, there’s a yellow square by Sol LeWitt which is just one of countless of works the American artist generated from algorithms, from sets of rules about geometry, shapes and colours, which he created and then followed through to produce thousands of variations.

There’s a drawing of the tiles on a floor by Rachel Whiteread which comes with quite an extensive label explaining that a) she has always been interested in floors which are the most overlooked parts of a room or building and b) that it’s a heavily painted drawing, done in thick gouache onto graph paper, which points forward, or hints at, the vast casts of rooms and entire buildings which she was soon to create.

There’s a work by Fiona Robinson which juxtaposes two sets of vibrating lines which she created while listening to the music of John Cage, and then of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Related to these, insofar as it’s black and white and made of abstract patterns, is this charming drawing by Richard Deacon.

Some Interference 14.01.06 (2006) by Richard Deacon © The Trustees of the British Museum

I found a lot of these ‘abstract’ works a lot more appealing than many of the rather obvious ‘messages’ in the ‘Power and Protest’ section. But maybe you’d prefer the latter. Different strokes. The whole point is, the exhibition has been designed to showcase the immense variety of images, formats and materials which can go into the making of ‘a drawing’.

The artists

What is a drawing? Well, this exhibition presents an impressive roll call of major contemporary artists all giving answers to that question, including:

  • Edward Allington
  • Phyllida Barlow
  • Louise Bourgeois
  • Stuart Brisley
  • Pablo Bronstein
  • Glenn Brown
  • Jonathan Callan
  • Judy Chicago
  • Adel Daoud
  • Richard Deacon
  • Tacita Dean
  • Michael Ditchburn
  • Peter Doig
  • Tracey Emin
  • Ellen Gallagher
  • Philip Guston
  • Maggi Hambling
  • Richard Hamilton
  • Gwen Hardie
  • Claude Heath
  • David Hockney
  • Andrzej Jackowski
  • Anish Kapoor
  • Anselm Kiefer
  • Minjung Kim
  • Marcia Kure
  • Micah Lexier
  • Liliane Lijn
  • Hew Locke
  • Nja Mahdaoui
  • Bahman Mohassess
  • David Nash
  • Cornelia Parker
  • Seb Patane
  • A R Penck
  • Grayson Perry
  • Frank Pudney
  • Imran Qureshi
  • Gerhard Richter
  • Fiona Robinson
  • Hamid Sulaiman
  • Jan Vanriet
  • Hajra Waheed
  • Rachel Whiteread
  • Stephen Willats

Apart from anything else, it’s a fascinating cross-section of the artistic practices and concerns of some of the most important artists of the last 50 years.

Mountain by Minjung Kim (2009) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Pushing Paper is in room 90, which is right at the back of the British Museum and up several flights of stairs, in the Drawings and Print Department. It is varied and interesting and thought-provoking, and it is FREE.


Related links

  • Pushing Paper continues at the British Museum until 12 January 2020

Other British Museum exhibitions

Where the Shadows Are So Deep by Imran Qureshi @ The Curve

The Curve

The Curve is an exhibition space at the Barbican, just inside the Silk Street entrance. It is a 90-metres-long, narrow but very high and gently curving room, which follows the contour of the main auditorium above it.

Imran Qureshi

The Barbican commissions contemporary artists to create works or installations to fill the Curve and it is currently showing an installation by Pakistani artist, Imran Qureshi, titled Where the Shadows are so Deep. Qureshi is an award-winning painter of miniatures – ornate, exquisite, delicately-coloured, small (18 inches tall?) paintings in a tradition which goes back to the Mughal emperors of India.

He has created 34 exquisitely detailed miniatures for this, his first exhibition in London.

Threatened by Imran Qureshi (2014) Gouache on wasli. Collection of Amna and Ali Naqvi, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

Threatened by Imran Qureshi (2014) Gouache on wasli. Collection of Amna and Ali Naqvi, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

Blood stains

But the small paintings are not the first thing you see. The first thing you see is a spotlight highlighting a big spattery bloodstain on the floor. Looking up you realise there are similar large splats of blood spaced across the floor and disappearing around the Curve. And on the wall too, lots of bloody shellbursts with one particular example of something horrible daubed onto the wall maybe 20 feet up, and then long strands of dried blood trickling down to the floor.

Early part of the installation showing bloodstains on floor and wall

Early part of the installation showing bloodstains on floor and wall

Looking closer you can see that what at first looks like chaotic splatters of blood (presumably paint) has been graced with white flecks and swirls to introduce shape and pattern. In fact some of the blood stains, on closer examination, are turned by this white flecking into the petals and whorls of large flowers, like enormous, blood-red roses. The twenty-foot cascade of blood is turned by its white curlicues into plaits of blood-red rope or hair. Rapunzel in the abattoir.

Blood spatter turning in to a flower (?)

Blood spatter turning into a flower (?)

Even some of the frames of the miniatures are blood sprinkled or contain what look like blood stains across their surfaces (see the fourth image, below). The effect is of a slaughterhouse – as if big mammals have been eviscerated here and their blood spurted across the floor, walls and exhibits. The echoes of their dying screams reverberate silently around the curving space…

And Will There Be A Spring When The Garden is Unblighted by Imran Qureshi (2014)Private Collection (Hong Kong)

And Will There Be A Spring When The Garden is Unblighted by Imran Qureshi (2014)Private Collection (Hong Kong)

The miniatures

Only after you’ve taken in this, the gloomy blood-soaked environment, do you lean in to see the individual paintings. They are portrait shaped, and almost all depict stylised trees or bushes, described with incredibly fine and precise brush or pen strokes, against a variety of idealised backgrounds in solid washes of subdued colour – scarlet or orange or olive.

All the works are painted on wasli, ‘also referred to as wasli paper, a type of handmade paper used specifically for painting miniatures’ (Wikipedia). Some are covered in shining gold leaf, some leave the paper bare and exposed, there is an understated ringing of themes and variations.

The images are hung at various heights – a few by the floor, one or two too high up to be examined in detail. Quite often, superimposed onto the image are vertical cascades of tiny silver droplets, like beaded curtains. Rain? Snow? Tears?

Rise and Fall by Imran Qureshi (2014) Gouache on wasli. Collection Claire Hsu and Benjamin Vochot, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

Rise and Fall by Imran Qureshi (2014) Gouache on wasli. Collection Claire Hsu and Benjamin Vochot, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

Only in one painting that I could see does a human figure, rather reluctantly, appear. These are strange and mysterious landscapes, untroubled by human presence… Many of the paintings have small passages of Arabic script written in blue ink – The title of the work? A quote? It remains mysterious.

But even the pictures themselves are not exempt from the surrounding carnage. Right from the start blood red tendrils have woven in and out of the trees or bushes. In some images red blood cascades down over the fictional landscape, blood red capillaries climb up bushes and blood red blotches even stain the parchment itself.

And Will There be A Spring When the Garden is Unblighted by Imran Qureshi (2014) Gouache on wasli. Collection of Amna and Ali Naqvi, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

And Will There be A Spring When the Garden is Unblighted by Imran Qureshi (2014) Gouache on wasli. Collection of Amna and Ali Naqvi, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and Corvi-Mora, London

Into the darkness

As you saunter further along the Curve it gets darker. Blood spatters continue to mark floor and wall right until the end but are harder to make out as you walk into almost total darkness, the lighting progressively diminishing. By the end only tiny, focused spotlights point out the rectangles of art and beauty, the miniature paintings creating light in the darkness, beauty balancing blood.

Into the darkness

Into the darkness

Not only does the gallery darken, so do the pictures. In three of the final four the landscape has ceased to be green or orange or gold but has become blasted black. Low thorn bushes appear on the rim of this terrain and, along with the darkness you are now standing in, it is impossible to avoid a premonition of complete disaster. The desolation of a nuclear blast.

Over the blackened waste land hover fleets of white-winged dragonflies, which have flitted in and out of the miniatures from the start. You can see them clearly in the first three paintings, above.

Maybe all that will survive of us is darting insects.


The video

Related links

Other Barbican reviews

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