DRAW: Vasari Revisited
DRAW: Vasari Revisited
Or a Sparring of Contemporary Thought
Drawings by Artists and Architects, Choreographers and Composers
Jun 1-13, 2009
A cross-discipline exhibition featuring work by established and emerging artists, including:
Marcella Corvino, Hermine Ford, Robert Moskowitz, Ned O'Gorman, Paul Siskind, Mira Schor, Andy Spence, Colin Thomson, Peter Townsend, Daniel Wiener with Biala, Daniel Brustlein, and Jack Tworkov and Ali Della Bitta, Jonah Bokaer, Deborah Brown, Jeri Coppola, Julio Caesar Frias, Julia K. Gleich, Drew Goerlitz, Brece Honeycutt, Andrew Hurst, Mary Judge, Brooke Moyse, Kevin Regan, Francisco Rivera, Jeremy Sapienza, Austin Thomas, Tyrome Tripoli, and Stephan Truax
An artist reception will be held the morning of Saturday June 6 at 11am.
Norte Maar is a proud sponsor of Bushwick Open Studios 2009.
Bushwick, Brooklyn — Norte Maar, the arts group leading the Bushwick art scene, is pleased to present DRAW: Vasari Revisited or a Sparring of Contemporary Thought. This exhibition stretches cross discipline featuring drawings by established and emerging artists + architects, designers, choreographers and composers.
DRAW: Vasari Revisited or a Sparring of Contemporary Thought brings together a tight selection of works by painters and sculptors, architects and designers, choreographers and composers both past and present and offers insight into modes of seeing and thinking, experiments in imagination, and the direct expression of original thought.
Through the course of art history, stretching back to the fifteenth century, drawing has played a subordinate role in the creation of a given painting, sculpture, costume, dance and musical notation, architectural structure or decorative work of art. Only through the confidence of artists, collectors, scholars, and a recently educated public, have drawings now come to possess an aesthetic quality of their own.
Drawing, as a significant and independent art form, has origins beginning in the sixteenth century with Vasari’s “Book of Drawings.”
In a theory of art, where “disegno” was regarded as the basic principle of all art forms, drawing was defined “…as a tangible presentation and explanation of a particular thought which originates in the senses and which is imagined in the mind and emerges in the form of the idea.” (Vasari)
Parallel to his renowned book The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painter and Sculptors, written between 1543 and 1550, [Vasari] gathered together a great number of drawings in the workshops of artists and then in the ‘academies’, where they were used to instruct students. He assembled these drawings in his Book of Drawings, which comprises several volumes, with the intention of making a visual history of art which would constitute one of the first ‘historical’ collections. Even while working as a young apprentice in the workshop of Vittorio Ghiberti the Younger, he had obtained from the latter a large number of drawings:
“I got some drawings, some by Giotto and some others, when I was just a boy, from Vittorio Ghiberti in 1528; I have always kept these and held them in veneration because they are so beautiful and are remembrances of so many men.”
Vasari’s Book of Drawing no longer survives as such. But we do have the following description:
“These drawing were arranged in several volumes about two feet tall and eighteen inches wide. All the pages, verso as well as recto, were filled; they contained practically all the masters who had preceded [Vasari] or were his contemporaries. To lend more elegance to the drawings, they were bordered by ornamental drawn with care by Vasari or his students, and the artist’s name was written at the foot of each in fine lettering.”
— Old Master Prints and Drawings: A Guide to Preservation and Conservation. Carlo James, Caroline Corrigan, Marjorie B. Cohn, Marie Christine Enshaian, M.R. GrecaTranslated by Marjorie B. Cohn.Published by Amsterdam University Press, 1997.
