Drawing Then: Innovation and Influence in American Drawings of the Sixties

Dominique Lévy is pleased to present Drawing Then: Innovation and Influence in American Drawings of the Sixties. The exhibition will investigate revolutionary developments in the practice of drawing that emerged in the United States during a decade of radical social and political upheaval.

Drawing Then is inspired by—and coincides with the 40th anniversary of—the 1976 exhibition Drawing Now, organized by Bernice Rose at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In her seminal catalogue essay, Rose wrote that “a number of artists have, and with increasing intensity since the middle sixties, seriously investigated the nature of drawing, investing major energies in a fundamental reevaluation of the medium, its disciplines, and its uses.” Forty years after Drawing Now, Drawing Then fills Dominique Lévy Gallery with more than 70 works by 40 artists, almost half of whom were not represented in the 1976 exhibition.

Drawing Then features loans from The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among other institutions, and includes works from the private collections of artists Mel Bochner, Vija Celmins, Jasper Johns, Adrian Piper, and Dorothea Rockburne. Drawing Then also presents two wall drawings installed on the occasion of the exhibition: the first, Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #20, comprised of systematically drawn colored pencil lines, has been realized for the first time since its debut at Dwan Gallery in 1969. LeWitt’s wall drawings demonstrate, in the words of Lawrence Alloway, “the possibility of drawing as pure ratiocination.” On the gallery’s second floor, Mel Bochner has installed his far less structured Superimposed Grids, originally conceived in 1968.