Raise your hand if you have never scribbled a drawing at school, university, during work meetings without paying too much attention while your thoughts ran to other problems or was engaged in a telephone conversation. The creator of that "Doodle" word that has now come into common use thanks to Google, albeit for other meanings, which in English means scribble, actually attests that the right side of the brain, the more creative one, is being used. This was well explained by Betty Edwards, emeritus professor of art at California State University in Long Beach, known throughout the world thanks to the methods for developing creativity in a famous essay. In the sense that those signs testify that reality is being perceived not according to the preconceived schemes of the rational mind, which is managed by the left hemisphere of the brain, but rather through the development of intuitive categories and creativity, overseen by the right hemisphere.
The French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici and the Beaux-Arts in Paris are dedicating two interesting exhibitions in collaboration with the Musée national d'art moderni – Center Pompidou, Paris and the Central Institute of Graphics.
Following the Roman exhibition, a second one will follow at the Beaux-Arts in Paris from 19 October 2022 to 15 January 2023.
The exhibition conceived by the two curators Francesca Alberti (Villa Medici) and Diane Bodart (Columbia University), with the collaboration of Philippe-Alain Michaud, as associate curator (Centre Pompidou) is based on around 300 original works ranging from the Renaissance to the contemporary era and highlights one of the most unknown and least controlled aspects of the practice of drawing . Addressing the many facets of doodling in the arts, from sketches daubed on the back of paintings to scribbles that become real work, the exhibition shows how these experimental, transgressive, regressive and liberating graphic practices, which seem to obey no rules, have always marked the history of artistic creation.
The Renaissance, in order to free itself from the constraints of Drawing then called "academic", produced free, instinctive and gestural graphic forms, which evoke the rudimentary drawings of children, the calligraphic digressions on the margins of manuscripts or even the graffiti of anonymous hands covering the city walls. Picasso, speaking precisely of children, stated: “It took me a lifetime to draw like them”; but Michelangelo already enjoyed imitating the characters (puppets) clumsily drawn on the Florentine facades. The exhibition explores this hidden side of artistic making and invites visitors to shift their gaze to the back of the paintings or to the walls of the workshop, to the edge of the drawings or under the detached frescoes….
Proposing unprecedented combinations between the works of the masters of early modernity, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Titian, Bernini…, and those of well-known modern and contemporary artists, Picasso, Dubuffet, Henri Michaux, Helen Levitt, Cy Twombly, Basquiat, Luigi Pericle…, the exhibition questions chronological orders and traditional categories (margin and center, official and unofficial, classic and contemporary, work and document) and places the practice of scribbling at the center of artistic practice.
Gribouillage / Scribble. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly, it has significant loans granted by prestigious Italian and European institutions, including: Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice; Museum and Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples; Royal Library, Turin; Opera Primaziale Pisana, Pisa; Musée du Louvre, Paris; Staatliche Museen, Berlin; Museu Nacional Soares dos Reis, Porto; Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris; Casa Buonarroti, Florence; National State Archive, Rome; Musée du Petit Palais, Paris…
The Roman exhibition is divided into six thematic sections which combine Renaissance and contemporary works including the extraordinary palimpsest of drawings traced on the back of the Triptych of the Madonna by Giovanni Bellini, conserved in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, which the public will have the opportunity to discover for the first time, as well as the drawings of Benozzo Gozzoli, Fra Bartolomeo, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Tiziano, Taddeo Zuccari, but also the works of the Carracci, Simone Cantarini, Algardi, Bernini from the most important Italian collections; or again the grotesque head of Leonardo da Vinci, loaned by the Beaux-Arts of Paris; and Delacroix's notebook preserved in the National Institute of Art History in Paris (INHA).
The catalog includes seven chapters and brings together unpublished contributions by seventeen authors: Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Baptiste Brun, Angela Cerasuolo, Hugo Daniel, Vincent Debaene, Dario Gamboni, Anne-Marie Garcia, Tim Ingold, Giorgio Marini, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Anne Montfort- Tanguy, Mauro Mussolin, Gabriella Pace, Maria Stavrinaki, Nicola Suthor, Alice Thomine-Berrada, Barbara Wittmann.
Gribouillage Scribble. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly
from 3 March to 22 May 2022
French Academy – Villa Medici
Viale Trinità dei Monti 1
