Artists don’t just paint and sculpt it seems; they also doodle. Sometimes on the backs of well-known paintings, sometimes in the background of paintings, sometimes on random scraps of paper. A new exhibit in Rome provides a rare look at some of that less ‘official’ output.
The Villa Medici, home of the French Academy in Rome, is showing “Scribbling and Doodling—from Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly” with nearly 300 works ranging from whimsical or playful to sharply political, critical, or boundary-breaking.
The exhibition’s catalogue calls them “experimental, transgressive, regressive or liberating graphic gestures” which include out-of-proportion figures, crude renditions of heads and bodies, comical caricatures and wobbly lines, scribbles and hatchings that to some break rules of academic art and resemble children’s doodles.
One commentator reminded of Picasso (yes, he’s in the show, too) saying of children’s drawings that “It took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.” The exhibit is on until May 22nd.
