Art museums have a sacred trust: To spark the imaginations of visitors; to challenge them not just to acquire knowledge, but to dream; to find the artist or curator in themselves.
"Drawing: A Broader Definition," a vividly dynamic exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, does just that. Clifford Ackley, longtime curator of prints and drawings at the MFA, has put together a freewheeling, eclectic exploration that crosses typical boundaries of the medium. It's loosely organized around themes - landscapes, flowers, undersea creatures, to name a few - but the real beauty of the show is in its invitation to viewers to make their own connections among the 66 works, and in so doing, make the exhibit their own.
Ackley has been at the MFA for 41 years. In a recent interview he insisted "Drawing: A Broader Definition" is not his swan song, but it is a rare event because it's so deeply personal, about the experience of looking at drawing more than about art history or technique. There isn't much in the way of didactic wall text. For Ackley, this show suggests, information helps, but it doesn't open one's mind the way simply looking does.
The show spans millennia, with work dating back almost 4,000 years and coming up to 1957. The decision to stop there was sharp. Ackley has mounted a small, enticing exhibit of 10 contemporary drawings in the hallway outside the Trustman Gallery, where "Drawing: A Broader Definition" is installed, and it's like looking at a different species of art - one that springs mostly from abstraction.
There's plenty of abstraction in the larger show, but it fuels and ornaments the figuration and the storytelling. Ackley says he was inspired to put this show together two years ago, when one day he found himself wondering what a brush drawing by Goya would look like beside a brush drawing by Hokusai. The Spaniard and the Japanese artist were rough contemporaries, on opposite sides of the world.
Those two works now make up part of an action-packed series of drawings that stretch back to ancient Egypt. Goya's dramatic "Two Men Fighting" (1812-1820) shows two men in a clinch, described as much in passages of tone as in line. Hokusai's "Yoshitsune Leaping Over Eight Boats" (from a sketchbook) looks as if it could be a storyboard for a Vin Diesel movie, with the hero hurtling over the water as armor-clad warriors duke it out in a boat below. The incredible linear detail, drawn in ink with the point of a brush, stuns the eye.
Then look at the depiction of Ramesses IV, drawn on limestone with a brush and black pigment. The elegant Egyptian sketch from 1153-1147 BC, perhaps a preliminary drawing for a larger mural, is sparer than Hokusai's, bold in the classical Egyptian style, but no less activated by gesture, as Ramesses lunges forward to attack.
It hangs beside a Greek ceramic drinking cup (510-500 BC) by Athenian vase painter Epiktetos. The keen design sets an archer crouching within the circle of the cup's rim; his elongated feet balance the composition. His curved back and shield echo the circle; the shield, depicting a horseman in black on red, contrasts with the red-on-black archer.
Ackley has a passion for ceramics; his embracing definition of drawing crosses mediums. He had to go into the vaults of many different departments at the museum to put together this exhibition, in which all but two of the objects belong to the MFA. Those extra two have been promised as gifts.
Another ceramic piece sent me scurrying back to take a second look at the Greek drinking cup. The 10th-century Persian bowl decorated with inscriptions and a crane-like bird is so different from the archer design. Where the archer is neatly contained in the circle, the crane reaches out with its legs and tail, and indeed with the inscriptions, as if to break out of its bounds. Yet both designs activate that circle; they seem to set it spinning.
The Persian crane hangs amid a gallimaufry of bird motifs, including a stylized early 19th-century Pennsylvania German folk art piece, made with watercolor and ink, of a pelican piercing her own breast to feed her blood to her nestlings. The sumptuous S-shape of the bird's body and neck, the patterning of feathers, and the dramatic scene - a reference to Christ - make this piece pop. Beside it sits a Mayan earthenware cylinder vase (680-750) with a fierce turkey raising its wings threateningly in bold brown and red tones against a white backing - quite a contrast to the self-sacrificing pelican.
It's delicious enough to linger within a single grouping such as this one, but don't. The joy of this show is in making links across themes, as well as across cultures, centuries, and mediums. For instance, you can go from the mama pelican drawing to another Pennsylvania German one, of a couple surrounded by flowers, exchanging a small cup. It's not as boldly executed as the pelican. Perhaps it doesn't need to be; its message is celebratory, not allegorical and emphatic.
The random ties you make as your eye scans the gallery delight: Don't miss the graphic correspondence between the flowing, almost Asian quality of Dutch draftsman Jacob de Gheyn II's "Clump of Trees in the Wind" (about 1605) and a floral-patterned stoneware vase from the 11th-century Song Dynasty.
Ackley's love of fluid gestures and his eye for design hold the exhibition together. So does his generous imagination, coaxing us, as a good teacher does, to forge our own ideas about the things he loves so well.
