NORTE MAAR for Collaborative Projects in the Arts

DIRECTIONS:  L Train to Brooklyn. Lorimer Stop transfer to shuttle bus which will
continue scheduled stops in Brooklyn. Dekalb Stop on shuttle bus. Walk 2 blocks
west on Wyckoff Avenue. Northeast corner of Wyckoff Avenue + Suydam Street.
 GOOGLE MAP

INFO CALL: 646-361-8512 

BUSHWICK, BROOKLYN—Norte Maar, the arts group leading the Bushwick art scene, is pleased to present DRAW: Vasari Revisited or a Sparring of Contemporary Thought. This exhibition stretches cross discipline featuring a selection of drawings by established and emerging artists and architects, choreographers and composers. The exhibition is located at Norte Maar, 83 Wyckoff Avenue, #1B, Brooklyn, and is open to the public by appointment June 1-13 with open house Saturday June 6 and Sunday June 7 from 11AM-7PM in celebration of Bushwick Opens Studios. An artist reception will be held the morning of Saturday June 6 beginning at 11AM. For directions and further info please visit: www.nortemaar.org or call 646-361-8512.

Through the course of art history, stretching back to the fifteenth century, drawing has played a subordinate role in the creation of a given painting, sculpture, costume, dance and musical notation, architectural structure or decorative work of art. Only through the confidence of artists, collectors, scholars, and a recently educated public, have drawings now come to possess an aesthetic quality of their own.

Drawing, as a significant and independent art form, has origins beginning in the sixteenth century with Vasari’s “Book of Drawings.”* In a theory of art, where “disegno” was regarded as the basic principle of all art forms, drawing was defined “…as a tangible presentation and explanation of a particular thought which originates in the senses and which is imagined in the mind and emerges in the form of the idea.” (Vasari)

DRAW: Vasari Revisited or a Sparring of Contemporary Thought brings together a tight selection of works by painters and sculptors, architects and designers, choreographers and composers both past and present and offers insight into modes of seeing and thinking, experiments in imagination, and the direct expression of original thought.

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*Parallel to his renowned book The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painter and Sculptors, written between 1543 and 1550, [Vasari] gathered together a great number of drawings in the workshops of artists and then in the ‘academies’, where they were used to instruct students. He assembled these drawings in his Book of Drawings, which comprises several volumes, with the intention of making a visual history of art which would constitute one of the first ‘historical’ collections. Even while working as a young apprentice in the workshop of Vittorio Ghiberti the Younger, he had obtained from the latter a large number of drawings: “I got some drawings, some by Giotto and some others, when I was just a boy, from Vittorio Ghiberti in 1528; I have always kept these and held them in veneration because they are so beautiful and are remembrances of so many men.”

Vasari’s Book of Drawing no longer survives as such. But we do have this description:

These drawing were arranged in several volumes about two feet tall and eighteen inches wide. All the pages, verso as well as recto, were filled; they contained practically all the masters who had preceded [Vasari] or were his contemporaries. To lend more elegance to the drawings, they were bordered by ornamental drawn with care by Vasari or his students, and the artist’s name was written at the foot of each in fine lettering.

Old Master Prints and Drawings: A Guide to Preservation and Conservation.

By Carlo James, Caroline Corrigan, Marjorie B. Cohn, Marie Christine Enshaian, M.R. Greca

Translated by Marjorie B. Cohn

Published by Amsterdam University Press, 1997