ART REVIEW : 2 Formidable Shows of LACMA Prints, Drawings : ‘Why Artists Draw’ proves the quality and breadth of the museum’s collection, while the title of ‘Rare and Great Prints’ is not an overstatement.

One of two new exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art includes a superbly dour drawing by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, the ultra-refined 19th-Century French academic chef d’ecole who accidently became a precursor of modernism. The subject is one Thomas Church, an English physician. Ingres may have smiled at the aptness of applying his scalpel-fine pencil to the depiction of a real surgeon. It was, after all, Ingres who regarded drawing as the probity of art.

And probe is what these shows do.

When the second of them opened Thursday, it completed a pair that, taken together, constitute the most complete look yet offered the public of the museum’s prints and drawings collections. We imagined they must be good. They turn out to be fairly formidable.

“Why Artists Draw: Six Centuries of Master Drawings From the Collection” amasses about 130 sheets, proving the holding has quality and breadth. It encompasses varied excellence from an airy landscape by Francesco Guardi to an authoritarian abstraction by Kasimir Malevich.

“Rare and Great Prints” opts for the whipped cream in just 50 deftly selected examples that do nothing to make the show’s title seem overstated. German art looks particularly strong in both places and nowhere more than in this selection, anchored by Albrecht Durer at one end and Emil Nolde at the other. Makes a nice coda to the museum’s amazing “Degenerate Art” exhibition. LACMA is impressive with regularity these days, but the nice thing about art is that the experience of it begins rather than ends once we’ve been impressed.

Once assured of good company we are free to probe the question of just what it is about the texture of all this that makes it seem so solid. Simple. We see artists all doing essentially the same thing for nearly 600 years: drawing. The act gives human culture continuity and makes it seem uncharacteristically sensible.

What is drawing anyway? According to one classic definition, it’s the attempt to represent a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface. Since that is impossible, the attempt has to involve human imagination. Actually doing it calls upon the utmost exercise of intelligence, skill, guile, craft and passion. Doing the impossible demands equal measures of the cautious and the cavalier.

Historically, caution takes the form of a mastery of craft. You sketch and study until you can do it in your sleep so that it looks easy. Jean-Jacques Lagrenee the Younger was an 18th-Century Frenchman little remembered today. (Drawing is very democratic. There are thousands of master drawings by obscure artists.) Lagrenee’s “Tancred and Clorinda” is mannered and artificial within the conventions of his day, but he had mastered them so well that the work looks like an act of pure fantasy with its blue paper and white chalk acting as enchanted moonlight. It’s as operatic as Monteverdi’s musical drama.

Looking at it, you know who Lagrenee was. Drawing is amazingly revealing that way. The ill-fated Romantic genius Theodore Gericault looks robust if troubled in his painting. Here, in a print showing routed French soldiers in retreat from Napoleon’s Russian campaign, we see an awkward side of Gericault, frighted and stiff to the point of paranoia. Vincent van Gogh’s “The Postman Joseph Roulin” shows the artist’s ardor in a coat drawn as if carved from wood. A self-portrait drawing attributed to the erotic rococo decorator Francois Boucher finds him disheveled, humorous and self-mocking.

If we want to probe for subtle distinctions, curator Bruce Davis provides the chance with some telling juxtapositions. Paired male and female nudes share high finish on blue paper. From across the room they could be by the same artist. Examined they are by separate artists of different nationality, time and temperament. George de Forest Brush spiritualized his woman by suppressing detail. Pierre-Paul Prud’hon invigorated his man by playing up muscular nuances.

Too bad Winslow Homer’s “After the Hunt” wasn’t hung next to John Singer Sargent’s “Rose-Marie Ormond Reading in a Cashmere Shawl.” Indisputable proof that LACMA possesses fine examples by two of America’s great watercolorists.

In many ways, printmaking is an extension of drawing. Both are essentially drafted. Printmaking just lets you have multiple copies. But there is something about the activity that seems to induce contemplation. Etching and engraving are a particularly slow business. You scrape away at the plate for hours. You wait while the acid bites a deep aquatint black.

Maybe that partially accounts for the sense of dense rumination in the splendid Durer prints and the Goyas and Rembrandts. In Rudolph Bresdin’s “The Good Samaritan,” concentration opens up to tangled fantasy and creates a clockless world where you can watch cellular matter grow and putrefy.

Ever since the advent of modernism and abstraction the innocent blue-sky probe has been, “Well, yes, but can he draw?”

The nice thing about this show is the way the then folds so seamlessly into the now. The slightly mechanical rendering of a reclining female by Max Pechtstein shows he was as concerned about form in this century as Jean-Joseph Taillason was in 18th-Century France. So were Aubrey Beardsley and George Grosz, but they played with form to create patterned wit. Occasionally artists set out to make drawing look so effortless they forgot what it was about. Point made in a rare Matisse clinker.

Abstract artists tended to draw space more than form but they drew it. Cubists drew subtle intersecting planes. Jackson Pollock drew galactic space surrounded by chaos. No one doubts that Richard Diebenkorn draws.

These shows take us back to the basics. They remind us the present art world has its priorities badly out of whack. They leave us feeling the world would be a better place if everybody would just draw, draw, draw.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. , to April 28. Closed Mondays. Information: (213) 857-6522 .