Claude Lorrain
The Tiber from Monte Mario Looking South, 1640
Dark brown wash on white paper, 185 x 268 mm
The British Museum

In a museum venue, where color draws crowds (Monet) and heightened color creates blockbusters (Van Gogh), shows of small monochromatic works can be a relief – an opportunity to hear yourself think, to catch the ‘sotto voce’ conversations of artists across history. Most of the modestly scaled figure-and-landscape or pure landscape drawings in this exhibition are brown ink on paper. There is color too, but in the form of subtle hints of red and blue, toned papers and delicate tinted highlights. Although the exhibition spaces for this show at the Legion aren’t empty, I don’t think the tour buses will be lining up for this show, which nevertheless offers what could be described as some of the finest drawings in western art. For one thing, the exhibition has on view THAT Claude drawing (see above), the one in so many drawing books, “The View from Monte Mario, 1640” in which loose puddles of brown ink somehow create in the mind trees, shadows and reflections, and the blank white of the paper a turning river, bright with reflected skylight. It is a drawing that defies categories of style. Some historians consider Claude’s drawings to be more significant than his paintings. After spending time in this show, I really felt, which I hadn’t before, that he does have a place in that pantheon presented on the Biographical Timeline in the second room, along with Vermeer, Rembrandt, Poussin, Ruisdael and Velasquez.

At the Legion, you enter the show through an exhibition of works on paper by Pousette-Dart (I’ve never liked his work in reproduction, but in person the works turned my opinion upside down), which points up the shift you make in entering into Claude Lorrain’s art from a modern perspective. It is physically subtle, intellectually complex and balanced rather than material, simplified and subversive. These drawings do not assert themselves into our viewing space but, instead, you lose yourself in his imagined realm. Numerous potential obstacles stand between us and Claude. As the wall text notes, Claude created the template for much landscape painting of the next 400 years, and it can be hard to see this work (especially the paintings) without the surrounding “noise” of hundreds of other subsequent landscapes, including those omnipresent prints in roadside motels and undemanding movie backgrounds. Then there is the taste, alien to us but common to 17th century painters at every level, for presenting historical and literary stories as if they were seen on stage (spotlit and arranged). There is more than a hint in Claude’s work of rhetoric, of the grand machine that engineers us through our response. But for every drawing in the show that feels academic, too studied or artificial, there is another that is intuitive and fresh. His paintings feel aware of an audience, the drawings suggest a viewer and the artist. And Claude speaks our language as the original artist of light and space. If Turrell stands on the shoulders of Rothko, and Rothko shakes hands with Turner, behind all those Turners stands his master Claude. With perfect visual pitch, the Mozart of ink washes, Claude suggests intimate emotional meanings, and deeply personal memories, of light and shade, nearness and depth, with pinpoint accuracy.

The exhibition is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. The British Museum owns Claude’s “Liber Veratatis,” an encyclopedic book of drawings, taken apart to show as individual drawings, that Claude created to record his own paintings—he was already plagued by forgers from his 30’s—to work out ideas, and record motifs to use in later artworks. There are also works from other notebooks of drawings from nature, and series of drawings of specific places. Claude spent much of his life in Rome, where he was equally influenced by Classical art and literature and by the expatriate Dutch and other northern painters who were among the first to see landscape as a serious subject for art. It is fascinating to me that the northern focus on the sparsely inhabited landscape as a painterly drama was so powerfully developed in Italy. Inspired by the countryside and light around Rome, Claude and others opened a huge new door on an entire genre of painting; several centuries later, Corot and his contemporaries, in the same place under the same light, created a revolution in painting outdoors. The exhibition proceeds through several large categories of subject, from formal, literary drawings to Claude’s most personal work: rapid wash sketches of minimal means which show an almost uncanny ability to link feeling and observation. And there is that untouched white paper again as brilliant light. I thought of musical composition when looking in that last room at the very developed studies of individual outdoor subjects.

Some of my favorite drawings included “Coast View with Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl, 1673,” where the waning light of sunset, in which you can and can’t see, unifies the stately procession of the Latin heroes and the muted landscape beyond; “Storm at Sea, 1643-44” a drawing, half-white surge on blue paper, that is Wagner without the bombast; a nocturne on blue paper evoking deep shadow and flat bright side light, “Landscape with Dancing Figures (The Mill), 1648,” in which a few strokes of ink create a complex of dense moonlight shadows in the mid-distance behind trees and a rustic building. “A Waterfall with Trees, 1635” in the last room is another drawing that confounds expectations. It crosses over to an Asian sensibility, using asymmetrical empty space, foreshadowing the English watercolorists loving attention to specific detail, and, when you step back offering an intellectually layered organization of form.

We are very fortunate to have this show.

Claude Lorrain - The Painter as Draughtsman: Drawings from the Briltish Museum will be on view through January 14th. More information can be found at http://www.thinker.org/legion/exhibitions/index.asp .