Exhibit Expands Definition of Drawing

The first thing bound to surprise visitors to the San Diego Museum of Art’s show, “Twentieth Century Drawings from the Permanent Collection,” is just how few of its contents are drawings in the conventional sense of the word. Few serve as preparatory studies for larger compositions; few are done exclusively in pencil, pastel, pen and ink or other typical drawing media.

Malcolm Warner, the museum’s new curator of prints and drawings, anticipated this pleasant jolt when he assembled the selection, and he prefaces the show with a wall statement declaring that “drawing is really the most unpredictable and kaleidoscopic of all the visual arts.” In selecting these 34 drawings, from the museum’s collection of more than 500 such works on paper, Warner upholds this definition, never attempting to focus on any theme or concept other than the drawing’s own diversity.

Moods and approaches vary widely here, though far more attention is paid to the lyrical and beautiful than the challenging. French artist Andre Lhote’s delicate strokes of translucent color in “La Place de Saint-Tropez” (1917) could hardly be further from American modernist Milton Avery’s brusque, scratchy brushwork in “Antique Apple Tree” (1943), but both watercolors embody the directness of expression commonly associated with works on paper.

Marc Chagall’s mixed-media image of a female nude gazing absently at an explosive array of flowers is as exuberant as Amadeo Modigliani’s celebration of a caryatid’s curves is spare, but again, both feel immediate, unmediated by an academic concern for “finish.” The same fluid directness lends vitality and a tender humanism to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s “Head of a Girl” (1937). A study of youthful earnestness as much as of the balance of masses, the watercolor, with outlines in black crayon, monumentalizes its modest subject with grace and dignity.

Through a more concentrated, formal intensity, Franz Marc’s small tempera painting of flowers (1913-14) achieves the commanding presence of a visual manifesto. The image’s jabbing, buoyant, swirling forms relate less to flowers than to the underlying force responsible for their creation and growth. The goal of art, according to the German artist, is “to break the mirror of life so that we may look being in the face.” Here, Marc has done just that, and found its expression to be at once rich, tense and beautiful.

Few other works in the show match the formal energy and dynamism of Marc’s.

Rico Lebrun’s 1950 “Crucifixion Scene” twists the traditional religious subject into a tight, tortured vision, giving the show a rare moment of psychic intensity. The body of Christ is nearly lost in the charged chaos of figures, shadowed in gray and sporadically swallowed by deep chasms of black.

Quieter, more self-reflective scenes prevail over such impassioned ones, however, and far more images in the show brood than bellow.

Charles Burchfield’s “Rainy Night” (1929), for instance, projects an inescapable air of melancholy. The damp, dank mood of the Buffalo, N.Y., street corner pictured here is broken by only the street lamp and automobile light reflections that swim spontaneously across the slick pavement.

Jose Luis Cuevas stares outward while actually gazing inward in his ink-and-pencil “Self-Portrait With Message.” The artist, dressed in gray, stands stock in the middle of the page, his gestures and surroundings providing cryptic clues to his complex identity. One of his hands points downward; the other, without the aid of his eyes, sketches a face far more lovely than his own. Below the drawing stands an oblivious horned animal and beside it sits a cutout figure, legs dangling below the paper’s edge. From the upper-right corner, an old, corroded face peers down at the scene, his judgment of it emanating from his lips in short, straight lines.

Clouds of gray stain the roughly textured paper and frame this scene in an ambiguous time and space. The artist’s poignant position, locked between youth and old age, beauty and decrepitude, the spiritual and the animal, explains his open, disarming stare.

Dating from 1973, Cuevas’ evocative drawing is one of the show’s most recent offerings. Only one work--a Robert Rauschenberg collage--dates from the 1980s.

Whether the show’s cursory treatment of the postwar years stems from the curator’s predilections or the collection’s is uncertain, but it does make for a stunted view of this century’s artistic output. Barely a hint is whispered of the radical changes in art introduced from the 1940s to the present by Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Conceptualism.

Nevertheless, “Twentieth Century Drawings from the Permanent Collection,” which continues through June 17, does offer some worthy glimpses into the museum’s storage vault. More such efforts--modest, instructive and occasionally inspiring--are encouraged.