Roger Malbert’s beautifully designed book is a welcome addition to the relatively sparse English-language literature on contemporary drawing. Monographic studies and exhibition catalogues by their very specificity are not designed for informative overview or elucidation of a particular area of contemporary practice. As head of Hayward Touring at the Southbank Centre, London, Malbert has organised, co-curated and written catalogues for the Hayward Gallery’s many successful touring exhibitions; he knows a wide range of museum and gallery collections intimately, and is in touch with practising artists across the UK and abroad.
The drawings discussed and reproduced so elegantly in the book are truly cosmopolitan, with many surprises from unfamiliar artists in Africa, South America, the Middle East, Asia and Russia, as well as more established works from international-circuit artists such as Paula Rego, Rosemarie Trockel, Francesco Clemente, Louise Bourgeois, William Kentridge, Marlene Dumas and Raymond Pettibon. There are no observational figure drawings of the kind still produced in sketchbooks; nor is every country with a rich, drawing-led visual economy represented. But such omissions are irrelevant in a personal choice that is so well researched, interestingly organised and revealingly annotated in commentaries on individual artists.
Malbert’s selection of artists, known and unknown, establishes his thesis that there is a global reinvestment in the human figure as a source of political, psychological and, above all, satirical commentary. For once, in an art world that worships the casual gestural sketch, these are predominantly complex, skilful and ideas-based drawings, weaving witty, disturbing or powerful fantasies about aesthetics as well as abjection. They celebrate exaggerated graphic elaboration, and also colourful and open-ended anarchic invention.
The sources for much of the material are that of mass-circulated popular imagery, and Malbert is slightly time-lagged in the introduction when he resurrects the pretty well defunct distinction between “fine art” and “mere” illustration, blurring recent history and significant debates in contemporary art colleges on “drawing from life”. However, in the five sections of the book he shows us how artists have reclaimed even clichéd human images, whether photographic, digitised or hand-generated, for entirely personal autographic and narrative ends, with an originality and freshness that only drawing can facilitate.
The beautiful and mysterious charcoal drawings of the Netherlands artist Juul Kraijer; the powerfully expressionist pen and ink portraits of the Zimbabwean-Libyan artist Virginia Chihota; and the fecund concatenation of art-historical quotations in the works of Russian-born Dasha Shishkin present irrefutable evidence that the long traditions of human representation are as powerful as ever, even under the heavy hegemony of the conceptual, the ready-made and the interactive.
The selection is not Eurocentric, and through sometimes rather daring interpretations of works from other cultures, Malbert supplies contextual ideas for approaching drawings, such as the crowded compositions of the Bengal-born Arpita Singh and the cool disturbances of Japanese artist Kumi Machida, or Yun-Fei Ji’s interpolation of grotesques into traditional Chinese landscapes.
I do have one regret about the book, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the author. The lack of footnotes and acknowledgements of very apt artists’ quotations suggests to me that readers or even plain viewers of pictures in this publication will be forced to use Google or do their own research if they want any follow-up. Eschewing references is a form of false populism that actually enforces obscurantism by withholding information, a misfortune when the author has gone to such pains to explicate and illuminate ideas.
Deanna Petherbridge, the author of The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice (2010), is an artist, writer and curator primarily concerned with drawing
Drawing People: the Human Figure in Contemporary Art
Roger Malbert
Thames & Hudson, 256pp, £29.95 (hb)