Space in Parenthesis

Compared with the sloppy and insensitive draftsmanship that plagues much of modern art fully a third of the pictures on display last week in Manhattan's Pierpont Morgan Library seemed minor masterpieces. Yet they were done mainly for pleasure, to while away an hour in the open, or as preliminary sketches for more ambitious work. Entitled "Landscape Drawings and Watercolors from Bruegel to Cezanne," the exhibition spans four little centuries of landscape art with 94 delicate little pictures.

Among the standouts were three Alpine landscapes by Bruegel, who turned inches of paper into miles of thousands of mountainside by the application of thousands of tiny ink lines sensitively stitched and pyramided together. Claude Lorrain's Sermon on the Mount created a hilltop grove, shepherds and their flock, a wide and crowded harbor and a distant town, all with a little ink and broad watery washes. Peter Paul Rubens' delicately tinted watercolor of a farmyard was as tender and vivid as April grass. Thomas Gainsborough's charcoal sketches showed that he could read the face of a field as surely as a human expression.

Visitors lingered longest before one of the tiniest works on view, the Winter Landscape by Rembrandt (see cut at full-size). Rembrandt broke with the polished limning of his day to create a graphic shorthand of his own, which amounted to putting space in parenthesis. He prized economy of line as much as the Chinese masters, but where they were flattish and fluent, he was spacious and staccato. Simply by the power of his pen, Rembrandt could make plain paper take on the bright leaden hue of winter sky stretching heavy over snow-muffled acres. As easily it seems, as another man would scrawl his name, he sketched fence, farmhouse trees and far-off mill into deep, cold stillness.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.