Rarely seen artwork by masters including Degas, Picasso, Klimt and Munch are being brought into the light for a special exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada.
Normally locked in a dark, temperature-controlled room, more than 120 mostly paper-based drawings and sketches will be the stars of “Gathered Leaves: Discoveries from the Drawings Vault,” starting Friday.
They include a 1924 watercolour, ink and gouache piece by Wassily Kandinsky acquired mere weeks ago, a 1913 graphite sketch by Gustav Klimt, and two pastels by Edgar Degas – “Racehorses” c. 1895-99, and “Dancers,” c. 1891.
Senior curator Sonia Del Re notes some are large, extremely elaborate and highly polished pieces, bucking conventional notions of paper-based images as preparatory exercises for more ambitious work in other materials.
“It's an area that is perhaps perceived as less glamorous than paintings or sculpture but it's actually a really fascinating world, because every artist has drawn, right?” says Del Re, head of the prints and drawings department.
“They can be final and highly finished artworks in-and-of themselves. Some of the artists represented in the show didn't paint or didn't do sculpture. They only drew,” she notes.
For example, a 1902 pastel of a seated nude by Edvard Munch was thought to be a rough preparatory sketch for a painting in a German museum, but closer examination suggests Munch assigned it just as much importance, says assistant curator Kirsten Appleyard. She says the recently acquired piece – obtained from the same family that owned the Kandinsky watercolour – can be seen in a photo Munch took of a 1902 exhibition that featured both the pastel and the painting.
"Very few (of these works) actually, are preparatory. A lot of them were stand-alone artworks that were meant to be enjoyed,” says Appleyard.
Often, they display a side of the artist that may not be apparent in other media, like the piece by Kandinsky, who was famous for holding on to paintings, she adds.
“There was one patron who had to go to his house and physically take the painting out of his hand because he wouldn't stop obsessing over it,” Appleyard says of the Russian abstract artist.
“But in the drawings, you see his creativity come to life. He's dashing these off in this rapid creative flourish. He had a lot more freedom in his drawings.”
The four-month show marks the 100th anniversary of the prints & drawings department and honours its pioneering women curators – Kathleen M. Fenwick, who came to the gallery in 1928 and helmed the collection for 40 years, and her successor, Mimi Cazort, who led the department for 30 years.
The department was established in 1921 but a centennial celebration was delayed by the pandemic. Del Re says the gallery now has about 30,000 works on paper, including Canadian, Indigenous and international works.
Drawings are defined as one-of-a-kind images created by the artist directly on paper, whether that involves graphite, ink, watercolour or pastels. A sketch is a less finished drawing, often in preparation for another work. Prints involve a design on a printing plate that is inked and transferred to another surface and may involve woodcut, engraving, etching and lithography.
Other pieces pulled out of storage include a vibrant gouache and pastel by Marc Chagall, c. 1945-48; three by Pablo Picasso dated 1906, 1920 and 1923 that use chalk, graphite and ink; a 1779 pastel by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun; and an 1816 pen and ink drawing by Théodore Géricault.
Appleyard calls the exhibit a rare opportunity to see treasures that have not been seen in decades or more, like the Chagall: "No one's really looked at it, examined it, studied it,” she says.
Too delicate for long-term display, Appleyard says the pieces can only be in the light for about 11 months, after which they must return to the vaults for at least five years. Gallery light for the show does not include high-intensity ultra-violet wavelengths and will be dimmed to 50 lux, a generally accepted international standard for light-sensitive materials.
Nevertheless, even low levels of light cause cumulative damage over time, so the gallery must balance preservation with access to the public.
Protected by Plexiglas, pieces will be hung at eye level for easy examination, with magnifying glasses on hand for a deeper look.
The colourful array in "Gathered Leaves" spans 500 years and also includes seven paintings and two sculptures from the Gallery’s European and Canadian art collections.
It begins with views of Canada by international artists, among them a 1895 depiction of Quebec's Cape Diamond by U.S. artist Winslow Homer, and a 1916 watercolour of Lake Louise by U.S. painter John Singer Sargent.
There are also two watercolours by U.S. painter Robert S. Duncanson, considered the first African-American visual artist of international renown, who fled to Montreal in 1864 for two years during the U.S. Civil War and helped shape a Canadian school of landscape art.
Del Re says one was discovered just one year ago but was marred by grime and a tear. She says the original owner had exhibited it like a painting for a very long time, perhaps because the paper was stretched over a frame in a technique more commonly used with canvas.
“But we were able to clean it, repair the tear and put it in a wonderful period frame and now it looks spectacular,” says Del Re.
Members get early access Thursday and the public can preview it that evening as part of the gallery’s Free Thursday Nights event.
“Gathered Leaves” runs until April 13, 2025 and then heads to the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, B.C., from June 15, 2025, to Oct. 20, 2025.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 11, 2024.
Cassandra Szklarski, The Canadian Press
