Defining Drawing Down

...How is one to look at Poussin's Judgment of Solomon, for instance, except as the doodled preliminary to the solemn canvas now in the Louvre, which the artist accounted his finest work but which most non-connoisseurs will find more than a little chilly...

...The slide from the Golden Age is inexorable, yet along the way other little miracles of art would happen, and often in the unlikeliest places...

...Look at Odilon Redon's charcoal drawing of Lady Macbeth...

...Do we need to be told that preteen girls around the world love kittens unduly, and that kitsch is kitschy...

...Whether Vouet's own face or not, it is as vivid a ghostly presence as black chalk can offer, a real, scrawny, know-it-all up-and-comer with the very snows of yesteryear caked to his boots...

...Those inclined to believe that recorded history has been one long slide from a Golden Age will find evidence here...

...Thomas M. Disch is the author, most recently, of The Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry...

...All this contrivance to no visible satiric, ironic, or cognitive effect, but—like the proliferations of cartooned Snoopies in recent paintings by Nina Bovasso—a complex and conspicuous waste of time and (if buyers can be found) money...

...All in all, not a compelling reason to venture to Queens—especially if you have not yet taken in "The Ages of Mankind: Time to Hope," a visiting exhibition of some hundred paintings and sculptures from a consortium of Spanish churches and museums, on view at the Cathedral of St...

...Perhaps one might have found the teenage Simon Vouet, four centuries ago, as callow in matters of global politics, but at least he knew how to make a compelling likeness of human flesh...

...The Renaissance lives up to its name in such a picture, which has that combination of sheer gorgeousness and grave dignity that was copyrighted by the Parthenon, but here we can see it in color...

...There is an El Greco, Agony in the Garden, that out-Herods El Greco's own St...

...an even larger installation, Prison by Los Carpinteros, a drawing showing five room-size grain silos converted into filing cabinets...

...They are meant to inspire faith in the Church and eternity's sacred truths, to make us feel Christ's pain and the Virgin's sorrow...

...The bright side...

...Happily, most of the work has been done for us by the compilers of the show's exemplary catalogue, Emman-uelle Brugerolles (curator of the collection in Paris) and David Guillet...

...Unfortunately, along the way, there was a general loss of skill...

...To attend such demonstrations of the low taste of the great unwashed is like being lectured on the evils of globalization and cattle-herding by a stoned fourteen-year-old...

...Art would finally pitch its tent among the commonplace, not the plaster casts and trumperies of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts...

...It hasn't the same iconic status, but I like it better than Broadway Boogie Woogie...

...John's is the New World's most imposing simulation of the Gothic style, and the chain of apsidal chapels in which the show is installed provides an ideal setting—with the subdued natural lighting most of these works would have received in their original homes...

...Not all art benefits from the noonday glare of museum lighting...

...Surely she has not been alone in extrapolating from the destruction of the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan—to say nothing of the World Trade Center—to a large-scale assault on the entire aesthetic fabric of civilization...

...The same can't be said for "Drawing Now: Eight Propositions," the new show at the Museum of Modern Art, in exile at the museum's temporary space in Queens through January 6. It would be a wonder if one could not find something to admire or be amused by among the over 250 drawings by twenty-six recent artists...

...Admittedly it has become harder and harder these days to shock gallery goers with anything that can be drawn or doodled or scraped off the pavement...

...Each of the ninety-three plates is glossed with its own small essay, which comprise, in aggregate, a crash course in French classicism...

...Over a hundred immortal pieces of paper gleaned from a span of over four centuries, but, even so, much less likely to cloy than the similarly scaled smorgasbord further uptown at the Frick...

...It is as hokey and inept as a drawing from a recent Disney cartoon...

...The Thaws are drawn to art that celebrates the artists' unforced inclinations and intimate associations—familiar streets and domestic interiors, flowers, friends, country roads, and farm animals...

...Here the art world sinks to its all-too-common lowest common denominator...

...There is even, seven levels down, a special crypt built just after World War I in prospect of such an event reaching these shores...

...Uninformed by such a purpose, many a crucified Christ or butchered saint would be hard to contemplate...

...John's, the Toledo pictures have found the right setting, for the Frick is like heaven's own bank vault...

...It is a sketch for a lost (though much copied) painting on the theme art seems to harp on most often and most plangently, which in recent years has been forced back into our view: the vanity of human wishes, the fragility of the fabric of civilization, the danger we are always in...

...Admission is free—though when you see the cathedral with its enormous timber bandage from the fire of a year ago, you would have to have a heart of stone not to leave a contribution to the building fund...

...Toledo, Ohio, that is, and "masterpieces" isn't just press-release puffery...

...For our acquaintance with Vouet and some few dozen other seventeenth-century French draftsmen we are in debt to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, whose show "Poussin, Claude and Their World" is being shown at New York's Frick Collection through December 1. The better part of the exhibition's seventy-one drawings are figure studies in a religious or classicizing vein that was to set the mold for the fine arts for the next two hundred and fifty years...

...But for those who like their Christianity marbled with darkness, "The Ages of Mankind" is essential viewing...

...Probably, most who attend the show will defer complete mastery of the catalogue's entire info-dump until they have reached the baroque heaven pictured in its pages, where such tasks are better undertaken...

...Anne teaching the child Mary to read (Mary points punningly to the first two letters of her own name), which is as winsomely charming as a tapdance by Shirley Temple...

...On the evidence here, that is a lost art...

...But for bringing the task within our compass the Frick and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts deserve our thanks...

...No lucky elephant dung this time...

...That boast, of course, depends upon a vast apparatus of safety nets: strongholds, treasuries, depositories...

...Learning to like either the canvas or the sketch, and even to look at them, is work...

...But as with the "Whitney Biennial" or the German "Documenta" exhibitions, the real wonder is how, with a whole world to glean from, the pickings should be this slim...

...Some inventive architectural fantasies by Paul Noble and David Thorpe...

...This is the fourth exhibition at the Morgan Library of the Thaws' remarkable taste and appetite...

...BY THOMAS M. DISCH In her latest succes de scandale, The Rage and the Pride, Oriana Fallaci forebodes darkly about the fate of the West's amassed art treasures...

...It is hard to look at these legions of Greek gods, Madonnas with children, and unknown gentlemen without acute advanced symptoms of museum fatigue...

...I remember being in a room of a provincial German museum in which one winced from a sense that such a chamber of horrors was too much of a bad thing...

...Whether one shares that faith or not, one must appreciate the candor of this approach and its consistency with what we must suppose was the art's original aim...

...In the epater department, the Queens show offers a second helping of Chris Ofili, the thirty-four-year-old Afro-British painter who stole the limelight at the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" show during its visit from the Tate in 1999...

...But then, across the room, the seventeenth-century Dutchman Jacob Ruisdael has a Ruined Cottage...

...The show is like a little Frick within the Frick, and it's drawn from a collection that came into being much the same way...

...instead, artless doodles of African-American ladies and gentlemen, both in ball gowns, the whole mish-mash constituted from the tiny Afro-coifed heads of Albinos and Bros with Fros...

...For a show of equivalent quality, though much smaller in scope, you should return to the Frick, where the Poussin and Claude exhibition has ceded some of the museum's limelight to twelve "Masterpieces of European Painting from the Toledo Museum of Art...

...The Thaws are not above acquiring a work for its anecdotal value, such as their small portrait of Rimbaud, probably copied from his group portrait with Rimbaud in it...

...John the Divine through November 24...

...It has taken all this time for the idea to seem common sense...

...There remains yet one more embarrassment of riches in New York: "The Thaw Collection: Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, Acquisitions since 1994," which is on view at another Gilded Age mansion, the Pierpont Morgan Library, through January 19...

...Those who associate Spain with pain—the flamenco, the corrida—will also find evidence, for crucifixions, depositions, pietas, and grisly martyrdoms are the stars of the show...

...Such as, to grab one six-by-seven-inch sheet of paper from the whole array, the charcoal drawing by Simon Vouet (1590-1649), perhaps a self-portrait from his teenage years with tousled hair and a spiky beard quite contemporarily punk, or perhaps from 1612, when he accompanied the French ambassador to Istanbul to paint the grand vizier (a task prohibited by Turkish law and so accomplished secretly from memory...

...More in-your-face than these overgrown props from the surrealist warehouse are Yoshitomo Nara and Laura Owens's take-offs on Japanese cartooning styles and American greeting cards and gift wrap...

...Like windows, the arts are, by their nature, an invitation to vandalism, even as those who love them boast that art is long, though time is fleeting...

...moats, fences, security cameras, and armies of guardians alert to those who would view those few precious strokes of pencil and brush that the ages have left as their record...

...Indeed, it is almost impossible to see these sheets of paper as the artists' contemporary would have—as so many ground-plans and lesson-books for the construction of a civilization still essentially on the drawing board, as ammunition in an ongoing war between the luxuriating Catholic south and the iconoclastic Protestant north in Europe...

...Tissot was a Frenchman in Victorian London, and his painting, louche yet decorous, is like a Whistler that has learned to relax...

...And Redon was teaching the next generation of Parisian painters, who would in turn teach draftsmanship to the artists on display at the Museum of Modern Art's show in Queens...

...In the mistier realm of conceptual-ism, "Drawing Now" offers aesthetic inflations whose cognitive weight can be taken in at a glance: Toba Khe-doori's crisp renderings of architectural details—a door, a strip of molding— each glorying in its own vast margin of blank white wall (a greater luxury here than at most venues, for the temporary space in Queens is not only scruffy but very cramped...

...Two reasons account for this: the sheer diversity of the offerings and the quirk-iness of the collectors, Eugene and Clare Thaw, who culled these works from the auctions and offerings of the last twenty years...

...As with the Spanish art at St...

...The Thaws snapped up a lot of the best, such as a pencil drawing of a crumpled dahlia by Mondrian that he drew in 1920 in order to pay the rent...

...But it is pain—its cruel infliction and brave endurance—that is the overriding theme, the lesson that one is challenged to ignore at peril of one's soul...

...These drawings aren't prefigurings for some dramatic altarpiece or mural—which is only a way of saying that life and art became more middle-class after the Baroque...

...There are also some fashion sketches in colored pencil by Elizabeth Peyton that are pretty enough to be subway posters, and sketches by Takashi Murakami and John Currin gawky enough to be lavatory graffiti, which I say without pejorative intent, since that seems the condition to which they aspire...

...The catalogue issued by the show's Spanish Catholic sponsors underlines this by declaring several times that their intention in offering these works to view is not aesthetic but homiletic...

...True, there are some fine enthroned Madonnas and other happily circumstanced saints, including a statuary group of St...

...John's, and a frieze-like The Flight into Egypt by Jacopo Bassano that is worth a visit all on its own...

...What passes in the art world as food for thought—conceptual art—seldom rises to a level of inventiveness set by the better poets who work in the same hyper-ideating vein...

...Sebastian at St...

...The same combination still obtains in James Tissot's picture of foreign visitors vogueing outside the National Gallery...

...Frick made his money in railroads, while Toledo's Edward Drummond Libbey was in glass, but they flourished in that era when Europe's treasures were spread at the feet of American millionaires like a field of daisies...