Contemporary Figurative Drawing

About

Drawing the figure was long treated as preparation for painting or sculpture. Since the 1960s many artists have made it the finished work, borrowing freely from forms once kept outside fine art.

Underground comics were one source. Robert Crumb's cross-hatched pen drawings for Zap Comix (1968) mixed satire, fantasy and confession, and Chris Ware later built intricate graphic novels from tiny panels. Raymond Pettibon paired ink figures with fragments of text, first for punk flyers and zines. Tom of Finland's erotic pencil drawings and Don Ed Hardy's tattoo designs brought other popular traditions into view. Robert Longo's charcoal and graphite Men in the Cities (1979–82) froze figures twisting as if struck. Kara Walker cuts black paper silhouettes into room-sized scenes of American history, and William Kentridge draws, erases and redraws in charcoal to animate his films. Look for line quality, speed, erasure and the interplay of text and image.