Twenty intimate sketches of artists’ models, family, and friends represent twenty ways of looking at one another. Some are characterized by empathy and even love, others by erudition and the daring to discover something new. Some are impulsive and immediate, others self-reflective. All are driven by curiosity about another face, another body.

Auguste Rodin records a dancer’s motion, moving his drawing hand fast across the paper. Paul Cézanne, with short, forceful lines, builds up the back of a posing man as if it was a landscape. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Robert Henri elevate anonymous models to icons of their class, articulating their self-assured pride as well as suffering. Paul Klee expresses his political worries in an allegorical figure, while Willem de Kooning projects sexual anxieties onto his explosive nudes.

Most Western artists studied figure and face drawing as part of their academic training—a practice that continues at Colgate University and elsewhere. They learned to appreciate the drawing of figures and faces as one of the most fundamental and most personal forms of art making.
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