The Undressed Art

 

The Undressed Art

Why We Draw

by Peter Steinhart

Knopf

2005 

 

 

The Undressed Art is both a defense and a description of the process of drawing figures from life, written at a time (the early 2000s) when Steinhart believed that traditional drawing skills were being devalued both in art schools and the art world more generally, in favor of photography, conceptual art and installations, and using computer graphics in commercial design. Steinhart argues that we should value drawing as a process and a practice, rather than for the product it produces.

 
Steinhart lays out his case in miniature in the first chapter, then works back through it over the course of the book, though in a way that's patient and conversational, rather than regimented or forceful. He starts with a discussion of children's drawings, and how so many of us stop drawing (and thus stop improving) around 9 or 10. He talks about sketching and learning to draw from observation. He talks about drawing nude models and about the experience of modeling. He discusses factors, like the rise of abstract expressionism, that have led drawing to fall out of favor in art schools. And he talks about producing finished works, and distributing them.

 
At a number of points he incorporates findings from neuroscience, to talk about what happens inside our brains when we look at a person, when we draw, when we look at a drawing. In brief, other people are the most interesting things in the world to us, their faces are the key to understanding them, reciprocal looking is the basis for connection and rapport, and drawing from life captures some fraction of those emotions and preserves them on paper.

 
'Drawing is seeing,' Steinhart says over and over again, by which he means that the act of drawing from nature, from observation, is a way of looking closely and carefully at something, and trying to recreate it. In the same way that you can't explain an idea to someone else unless you understand it yourself, you can't draw something well unless you've really seen it. He argues that this is an innate human faculty, like language or music. Most of the time, we don't draw to make art. We draw to draw; we draw to see.

 
Steinhart views drawing as perhaps the most humble form of artistry. He doesn't try to aggrandize it, only to ennoble it. He's writing for an audience of fellow enthusiastic amateurs. Even among people who make art professionally, it's a minority who can make a living, even fewer who'll be famous. So his defense of drawing doesn't rest on the idea that it's a pathway to fame. Only that it's worth doing, worth practicing, worth trying to do well, even if your only audience is just yourself. If drawing is a profoundly human activity, then we draw to feel connected with our common humanity, and the great number of other drawers throughout history, whose works are not seen, whose names are not known.

 
Drawing from live nude models has always been controversial, sometimes scandalous. There are always people who think it's improper, others who find it unnecessary. And there are always people who believe in it so much that they'll meet regularly and pay fees to hire models to draw. In cities with enough artists, some people can make a living as models, but it's physically strenuous work, and precarious. I modeled once for an art class in grad school - because I was curious, because I wanted to feel a connection to the art world, because I wanted the students to learn to draw a transgender body. But the opportunity's never come up again. Steinhart says there's always a moment of desire and embarrassment when the model disrobes, before the drawing starts. But the work of observation and recreation crowds out any sexual meaning and replaces it with discipline, and art.

 

There are illustrations throughout the book, drawings of life models by some of the artists Steinhart talks to. Among other things, these drawings help contextualize what he's talking about when he describes the differences between sketching and finished work, or how artistic poses differ from the way we're used to seeing nudity in pornography or advertising.

 
Steinhart's observations about kids' art matches what Georges-Henri Luquet says in Children's Drawings, and though he talks to far fewer art models than sociologist Sarah Phillips, but he makes some of the same points she does in her book Modeling Life. Between reading this and watching so much Portrait Artist of the Year lately, I feel a bit tempted to try to start up drawing again, which I haven't done seriously since high school. It does take a lot of time to do well. There's also a certain irony to Steinhart's motivation, from my perspective. Figurative art and the skill of drawing may be out of favor at our most elite art schools, but I read so many comics, so many books with illustrations, and it's all drawing (whether on paper or a digital tablet) that produces the type of art I see and seek out most.