Different Shades of Drawing's Spectrum

Of the artists included in the Museum of Modern Art's "Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing," half are professionals, while half are outsider artists. Other than the fact that all 100 works on view are drawings and that they belong to MoMA, they share little in the way of a unifying theme. Some of these artists are long dead while others are still quite young, and they come from all, or almost all, corners of the world.

The curators would contend, however, that this pluralism is itself a common thread, a corporate refusal to hew to any prescribed or centralized manner of draftsmanship. Such notions, of course, compel us to wonder whether, at this late date, there is anywhere on the planet a common and unified way of drawing against which the artists at MoMA might implicitly or explicitly rebel. Surely the days are long past when draftsmen emerged from their academies aspiring to draw like Raphael or Guido, like Ingres or even Picasso.

For that reason, the diversity of styles on view in this show, or the plurality of languages of drawing, as the curators would have it, should come as something less than a shock. Perhaps the fact that these artists are drawing at all, in our age of concept art, installations, and computer generated images, is sufficient news in and of itself. Beyond that, it is possible hesitantly to put forward a few observations about the styles of draftsmanship in the exhibition. There is, for example, a general affection for allover patterning, a horror vacui, shared by the outsiders and professionals alike, and a tendency toward nervous, fidgety lines. Apart from these shared qualities, viewers are well advised to approach the works as they come and to appreciate them for what they are. There are good works and bad works on display, both by the outsiders and by the professionals. And if there is a certain oddity to the works that the artists exhibit, that oddity is more a function of spirit and of a certain surrealist exorbitancy, than of form.

To set the tone, the exhibition begins with pen, ink, and wash drawings by Saul Steinberg, of New Yorker magazine fame. Given that he and so many other artists in this show, professional and otherwise, owe a great debt to Paul Klee, one wonders why this Swiss artist is not represented as well, despite MoMA's extensive collection of his works.

Another artist included is Henry Darger, who of late has attained an improbable omnipresence in the art world, especially with the recent opening of a large exhibition of his work at the American Folk Art Museum. Darger was as far outside the artistic mainstream as you could get. He worked as a janitor and, in his spare time, he created brightly colored, phantasmagoric images, such as the one on view, of naked children fighting the forces of cosmic evil. Undeniably there is something very special about his work, as well as the story behind it. But criticism must resist the hyperbolic claims that have lately been made for his skills as a draftsman. These images were primitive and untutored in the extreme, and to assert otherwise requires that one stubbornly reject the testimony of one's eyes.

More compelling are such little-known outsiders as Oyvind Fahlstrom, a Brazilian-born Swede, whose brilliantly hued and minutely drawn patterns possess all the breathless and incessant energy of a fever dream. One senses something of the same shrill gleam of lunacy — I mean that in a good way — in the works of the American Bruce Connor. Compared with both of these men, the faux savagery of Jean Michel Basquiat, also on view, looks pretty tame and depleted.

Very different are the frail, minimalist works of Yayoi Kusama, one of the most subtly skillful artists alive. Here she is represented by two of her earliest works, from 1951 and 1952. But one sees in them, both in structure and technique, a clear continuity with what she is producing today.

Perhaps it would be churlish to point out that this exhibition would have been slightly better off without the dead weight of such usual suspects as Mike Kelley, Richard Prince, and Raymond Pettibon, all of whom draw extensively and quite poorly. But their lackluster contributions are more than compensated for by the genuine oddity of such men as Jim Nutt and Jim Shaw, not to mention Alfred Jansen and Ray Johnson, R. Crumb and, of course, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, represented here by a portrait of her "Dada Portrait of Berenice Abbott" (c. 1924).

As that list of names will suggest, "Glossolalia" is a very mixed bag, with enough surprises to make it well worthy of the attention of the art-loving public.

Until July 7 (11 W. 53 St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).