Drawn Together: Five Centuries of Drawings from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Between January 24 and February 1, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art participated in Master Drawings New York 2020. The art fair, established in 2006, provides an opportunity for drawings enthusiasts and connoisseurs, curators and collectors, artists and scholars to enjoy a broad range of works on paper, from compositions by Renaissance masters to work by contemporaries. 

The BCMA is proud to have been the second campus museum to have been invited to share highlights from its collection with MDNY participants through a dedicated exhibition (The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University was the first in 2019). Home to the earliest public collection of drawings in the United States, the BCMA was pleased to be hosted by Driscoll|Babcock Gallery, the oldest commercial gallery in New York City, for the installation of Drawn Together: Five Centuries of Drawings from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Drawn Together featured twenty-one masterworks from the BCMA’s collection, from the early sixteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Programming included talks for the public and a reception for New York-based members of the Bowdoin community, with presentations by Bowdoin alumni and BCMA Advisory Council members, Shelley Langdale ’85, Curator & Head of Modern Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Shaun Leonardo ’01, artist, whose Champ (Sonny Liston 2) (2015) was included in the installation. The acquisition of the work was supported by the BCMA’s Collectors’ Collaborative.

Shaun Leonardo’s recent charcoal testified to the ongoing importance of drawing as a creative tool and aesthetic achievement from the Renaissance to the present. To this end, Drawn Together opened with selections from James Bowdoin III’s foundational 1811 bequest of works of art to the College he endowed. Among the featured highlights was a work from the workshop of Raphael picturing Donatello’s Miracle of the Miser’s Heart. Consulted in their original folios throughout the nineteenth century, Bowdoin’s drawings were given a place of prominence in the new Walker Art Building in 1894, where they represented one of the inaugural exhibitions. Since that time, they have continued to educate and inspire Bowdoin students, alumni, and other benefactors who have continued to enhance the collection with transformative contributions to the Museum’s holdings. The generosity of many of these individuals–David P. Becker ’70, Susan Dwight Bliss, halley k harrisburg ’90 and Michael Rosenfeld, George and Elaine Keyes, and Dorothy and Herbert Vogel–was critical to the success of Drawn Together.

Direct exposure to master drawings continues to serve as a critical resource for instruction in the study and making of art. Students in Bowdoin’s introductory drawing course attempt their own copies of works in the Bowdoin collection as their first project. Elihu Vedder’s preparatory drawings for a mural painting executed for the Museum’s rotunda, are a popular choice. Working from the original reveals the relationship between scale and touch and “establishes a kinesthetic understanding of drawing” explains the artist Professor James Mullen, giving Bowdoin’s art students “a feel for the relationship between a mark and the physicality of a wrist, an elbow, a shoulder.” Renaissance specialist, Susan Wegner, associate professor of art history, notes that the material reality of the object creates an exciting “physical connection between what was made 500 years ago and them,” a “conduit into another world, another time and place.”

Drawings continue to inspire emerging talents, providing unique insight into the history of art, its making, and makers. Drawn Together: Five Centuries of Drawings from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art celebrated their remarkable power to interweave the many generations of intellectuals—scholars, collectors, and makers—who continue to tease out their many lessons. 

Anne Collins Goodyear, Co-Director
Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Visitors enjoy a gallery presentation at the exhibition Drawn Together Five Centuries of Drawings from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art at Driscoll Babcock in New York City in January.