Drawing has always been the foundation of art, even in recent decades when, sadly, it fell out of fashion in art schools and sometimes seemed in danger of disappearing altogether. Fortunately, it hasn't. Three exceptionally fine drawing shows -- on view at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul and also on the University of Minnesota's West Bank campus -- celebrate the medium in all its endless versatility and freshness.
By coincidence, the shows spotlight three key subjects that have long challenged artists -- the human figure, landscapes and geometric abstraction. The university's Nash Gallery is also featuring a selection of drawings on loan from the Weisman Art Museum -- more than 65 works in various styles spanning 300 years, from 17th-century drapery studies to 20th-century abstractions.
Judith Roode: Body Songs From 1977 to 1991, Roode taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where the rigor of her drawing instruction and "Visual Journals" course made her something of a local legend. She was involved with the feminist collective WARM Gallery in those years and has a long résumé of shows, especially at college and university galleries. But in the early 1990s her professional career went essentially dormant after a debilitating illness forced her to quit teaching and stop drawing.
The St. Catherine show, curated by a former student, Mary Esch, makes clear what a huge loss Roode's illness inflicted. The show encompasses about 25 years of her work, from an early 1967 self-portrait to huge drawings up to 8 feet wide of coiled figures reaching toward each other in "Approach-Avoidance" postures, as she calls the series done in the early 1990s.
Roode has always eyed her subjects with unsparing honesty, even brutality. Her earliest self-portrait is startlingly harsh, depicting a sullen, gimlet-eyed harridan with wizened neck and scraggly hair under a comically ugly porkpie hat. Later self-images are equally unflattering, with narrow eyes, swollen lips and seemingly bruised flesh rendered in luscious sunset hues of rose and apricot.
A slender exhibition catalog notes the artist's fierce embrace of her German artistic heritage as defined by Käthe Kollwitz and Max Beckmann. But there is also more than a whiff of the existential alienation of the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon swirling through her work.
Roots and affinities aside, Roode's drawings command attention with the brio of their draftsmanship and the energetic elegance of her designs and details. Most of her brilliant drawings are studies of models in the studio. In "Fetal," a woman's muscular torso curls into itself, legs sleekly coiled into the embrace of taut arms and knotted hands. In "Kristi on Loveseat," a delicate line suggests the seat's back while a swirl of bold lines defines the model's lean shoulders, pendulous breasts, strong fingers and muscular thighs.
Giving weight, heft and persuasive form to such complex arrangements of flesh and bone is always a challenge, and Roode meets it head-on each time. Foreshortened arms and legs, a torso sinking into a mat, arms akimbo, hands curled -- she captures in sure, swift lines all the postures the body can assume in recline. Even when Roode scratched her images into dark surfaces, there was never anything tenuous or uncertain about them. Her later images of a "Spirit Guide" hovering over a crumpled torso and a "Dark Guardian" swirling out of blackness rival the late work of Goya or Rembrandt in their hard-won acceptance of life's bitter sorrows and persistent hope.
