Minneapolis museum showcases 100 master drawings from its collection

Like perfect pitch in music, drawing remains the skill by which artistic talent is measured.

Starting Sunday, Minneapolis Institute of Arts visitors can see how 100 different artists have drawn over the past 500 years and then step into the museum's own studio and try their hand at sketching a still life, the human figure, or whatever springs to mind. The museum has even unearthed some plaster casts of antique sculpture that can be copied, as students once did in art school.

The DIY room is the playful wrap-up to "Marks of Genius: 100 Extraordinary Drawings," an important show of impressively varied drawings, watercolors and pastels from the museum's collection. Running through Sept. 21, the exhibit anticipates the museum's 100th birthday next year and will travel to museums in Grand Rapids, Mich.; Raleigh, N.C., and Omaha after it closes in Minneapolis.

Don't worry, though. "Genius" is designed to show off the museum's treasures, not to put visitors on the spot. Artists will be in the studio from 6 to 9 p.m. every Thursday to demonstrate and talk about their work, but picking up a pencil is optional for visitors.

"We're really focused on the idea that drawing is a universal practice that is fundamental to painting," said associate curator Rachel McGarry, who organized the show and wrote much of its 300-page catalog.

She began scrutinizing the museum's drawing collection in 2006 when she arrived in Minneapolis — with her husband and their 2-year-old — fresh from Rome, where she had been researching her doctoral dissertation on Italian baroque artist Guido Reni.

"I had no idea what was in the collection because it had never been published," she said recently. "I love being an art historian in the age of Google, because with a few keystrokes you can find amazing things. But there were things here that no one really knew about," because they'd never been written up. In 2009, when Tom Rassieur was hired to head the drawing department, McGarry proposed "Marks of Genius," her first major exhibition at the MIA.

Of the 87,000 objects in the museum's collection about 40,000 are works on paper. Of the paper pieces, just 2,600 are drawings, while the rest are prints (etchings, engravings, woodcuts), artists books or other constructions. Though seldom as pricey as paintings, drawings are rare and can be costly because they're so fragile. Works by European Renaissance masters are especially scarce because so many were damaged or destroyed as they were handed about in workshops to be copied by students and admirers.

Scarcity, naturally, has boosted prices and made it ever more difficult for museums to acquire top-quality pieces. Still, the MIA has added, through gifts and purchase, more than 400 drawings in the past five years, including 35 in this show. They range from a notebook-sized 1520 "Head of a Bearded Saint" by G.A. Sogliani to "Tress IV," an 8-foot-tall drawing of dreadlocks cascading from the head of a beautiful black woman. The latter was sketched in 2008 by Mequitta Ahuja, a Baltimore artist who will discuss her work in the museum's drawing studio on Aug. 7.

"The market for Old Masters has never been hotter," McGarry said, citing a Raphael drawing that sold for $48 million at a Sotheby's auction in December 2012. "We're not going to buy a Raphael, because $48 million is years and years of the museum's acquisition budget. But we did buy that Sogliani head, which is a wonderful Florentine Renaissance drawing."

Drawing shows can seem fussy because lights have to be kept low to prevent fading, older pieces are typically small because paper was scarce and expensive, and flocks of potentially soporific angels, saints, virgins, martyrs and Greco-Roman deities flap about in things done before 1700.

"Genius" avoids the preciousness of all that by arranging art of various sizes into broad themes that mix centuries, countries, styles and subjects. So the first gallery, "Artist as Observer," includes Egon Schiele's stunning 4-feet-tall sketch from 1910 of an anorexic "Standing Girl" as well as Sogliani's 1520 saint's head. There's a pretty 1930 vase of flowers by Édouard Vuillard, an explosive 1908 self-portrait by Lovis Corinth, an emotive 1817 "Head of a Mustachioed Man," by A.L. Girodet-Trioson, a 1760 "Standing Male Nude" by N.B. Lépicié, and a 1923 sketch of a house by Edward Hopper. There's more, of course, but that sample alone spans five centuries of artists from Austria, Italy, France, Germany and the United States.

There are riveting masterpieces throughout. Adolphe Appian's light shimmering on the Valromey Valley is painterly in its finish, as is J.F. Lewis' exquisitely lit interpretation of another artist, Murillo, at work in Seville. Nearly 8 feet wide, Jim Dine's 1988 watercolor "San Marco With Meissen Figure and the Buddha" is a stunning fusion of multicultural images inspired by architecture, porcelain and sculpture.

And there are surprises. Famous for his primary-color abstractions, Piet Mondrian is represented by a delicate watercolor of a Dutch farmstead. Even war gets unexpected treatment in George Grosz's "Street Fight in Vienna," a soft-focus abstraction that renders in surprising detail a bloody 1934 urban battle.

One of the museum's earliest acquisitions is here — a 1909 pen-and-ink sketch of "Little Red Riding Hood" encountering a wolf in an ominous landscape, by British illustrator Arthur Rackham. It entered the collection in 1923, a mere eight years after the museum opened. In psychological depth and imaginative delicacy it is, indeed, marked by genius.