Life Lines: Portrait Drawings from Dürer to Picasso at the Morgan Library

Ed Voves | Art Eyewitness | 30th July 2015

In the endless debate over the importance of line versus colour in art, an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum tips the scales toward the former. One critic gasped about a Durer portrait, drawn almost 500 years ago “as compact as a Brancusi sculpture, an audaciously abstract compression of solids and voids”. This reviewer is equally forthright: “Drawing is the foundation, the one indispensable prerequisite, of all great art.”