LOS ANGELES—In early July, the Colorado developer Larry Marx and his wife Susan announced that they had chosen the Hammer Museum at UCLA to inherit their collection of drawings and other works on paper, citing the Hammer’s focus on the medium as the primary reason for their decision. While the Marx bequest is undoubtedly the biggest graphics art story of the L.A. summer, the city is currently the site of important exhibitions showcasing etchings, lithographs, drawings, and watercolors by such masters as Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Henry Moore, Camille Pissarro, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat. These offerings, like the Marx gift, remind us that the graphic mediums, so often considered secondary to painting, are much more than occasions for sketches, doodles, and half-hearted experimentation. Works on paper may be small and fragile, but in terms of craftsmanship and aesthetic quality they can be as impressive as large framed canvases or imposing sculptures in stone or bronze.

Drawing the Modern
Defining Modernity: European Drawings 1800–1900, on view at the Getty Center though September 9, focuses on the evolution of artistic methods during the 19th century. The exhibition pulls together drawings, lithographs, and watercolors from the Getty’s collection by Cezanne, Degas, Pissarro, Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh, among others, and demonstrates how these artists mastered the new creative materials that became available during the period. Seurat worked extensively with the recently invented Conté crayon, working its dense greasy texture into rich Michallet paper to magnificent effect. A standout in the show, Madame Seurat (The Artist’s Mother) (1882–83), is at once dramatic, mysterious, and otherworldly. By contrast, Une Elegante (Woman Strolling) (ca. 1884) is poised and graceful, glowing with an inner light, an example of Seurat’s preoccupation with depicting contemporary themes in an artistic language at once modern and classical. Both works demonstrate the technique Seurat termed “irradiation”—the ability to simultaneously show shadow and light by using different tones of the crayon instead of harsh lines.

Just as Seurat was drawn to the possibilities of Michallet paper and Conté crayon, Pissarro stocked up on high-quality Whatman paper during a stay in England in 1870–71 and subsequently began experimenting with watercolor. Because the durable paper absorbed the pigment more slowly, the artist had time to manipulate the watercolor to create, for example, the realistic, tone-filled sky in a work like Louveciennes, Route to St-Germain (1871).

Other outstanding watercolors include The Giaour, by Theodore Gericault (ca. 1822–23), and J.M.W. Turner’s Long Ship’s Lighthouse, Land’s End (ca. 1834–35), both noteworthy for the way they let the white of the paper shine through to render the scene dramatic. A lesser-known Turner—William Turner of Oxford—contributes the spellbinding, serene Stonehenge at Twilight (1840).

Moore on Paper
“Henry Moore Drawings & Prints,” the current show at Leslie Sacks Fine Art (through August 27), presents a carefully chosen selection of prints and works on paper by an artist best known as a sculptor. Though he will always be linked to graceful, pared-down forms in bronze and marble, Moore placed huge importance on drawing: Even in later years, when his hands were affected by arthritis, he always found time to draw. And good draftsmanship was critical to him, as is evident in a lithograph like Standing Figures (1949), in whose classical rendering the abstract sculptor’s interest in technical drawing shines through.

Nonetheless, these formal matters are largely overshadowed by certain thematic concerns, in particular the motif of mother and child (the death of Moore’s mother in the early 1940s, followed a couple of years later by the birth of his daughter, is thought to have heightened his preoccupation). It was a subject the artist would return to again and again, as evidenced by his “Mother and Child” etchings, many of which are on view here. Mother and Child XXVIII (made in 1983, just three years before Moore’s death) is sweet and touching, with the boy’s face looking like an adult’s (perhaps the artist’s own?). In Reclining Figure and Mother and Child Studies, a 1977 lithograph, the mother is awkward and lumbering (Moore’s mother also suffered from arthritis). The figures in Two Women Bathing Child II (1973), meanwhile, are dark, distorted, and sinister.