The French Academy in Rome presents
Scribbling and Doodling. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly
Scribbling and Doodling. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly
March 3 – May 22, 2022
Académie de France à Rome – Villa Medici, Rome
Cy Twombly, Untitled (North African Sketchbook), Part XXIV, Rome, 1953
From the press release
Through a collection of almost 300 original works dating from the Renaissance to the modern era, the two presentations of the exhibition will shed light on one of the most unconventional and overlooked aspects of the practice of drawing. By exploring the multiple features of the practice of scribbling and doodling, from sketches scribbled on the backs of canvases to expansive doodles conceived as artworks in themselves, the exhibition unveils how these experimental, transgressive, regressive or liberating graphic gestures, which appear to flout all laws and conventions, have punctuated the history of artistic creation.
The Renaissance period, in order to escape the constraints of Drawing (il Disegno) that what would later be referred to as “academic”, produced free-flowing, instinctive and gestural graphic forms that may recall the rudimentary drawings of children, the wandering calligraphy found at the margin of manuscripts or the graffiti scrawled by unknown hands on city walls. Picasso had the habit of saying, regarding children: “it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them”; Michelangelo had already amused himself by imitating the stick-like figures scrawled on the façades of Florentine homes. The exhibition thus explores this hidden side of artistic creation, by inviting visitors to shift their view toward the back of paintings or on the walls of artists’ studios, to look at the margins or the verso of drawings sheets or beneath detached fresco decorations…
By displaying works by masters from the early modern period – Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Titian, Bernini, etc. – next to those of major modern and contemporary artists – Picasso, Dubuffet, Henri Michaux, Helen Levitt, Cy Twombly, Basquiat, Luigi Pericle, and many others – the exhibition reconsiders chronological classifications and traditional categories of art history (such as margin and centre, official and non-official, classic and contemporary, artwork and document) and places the practice of scribbling at the heart of artistic making.
For further information:
Académie de France à Rome – Villa Medici, Rome
villamedici.it
