“Sketch, Shade, Smudge: Drawing from Gray to Black” at Harvard Art Museums is among the most glorious how-to’s you’ll ever find. The Harvard prints and drawings collection is one of the best in the country, and this show proves it. Spanning two centuries, its no-nonsense categories lead you step by step through highlight after highlight of what some consider to be humanity’s elementary medium; before language, we had drawing, famously 21,000 years old on the cave walls in Lescaux but in countless other places as well. We’re still doing it, which says something worth considering. In this, a 101 of an essential medium, here are a handful of pieces that stand out.
Sandra Allen, ‘Auspice,’ 2001
Allen invested more than a thousand hours in drawing this grizzled tree trunk, which she saw and photographed on one her routine walks at World’s End in Hingham. That’s right: She works from her photographs, translating what the lens captures to paper with uncanny precision in crisp graphite. The obvious question, I suppose, is: When even a phone camera can register pinpoint detail almost as clearly as reality, why take the time to do this? The answer, I think, is in the doing. Allen’s practice is a deep investment in close looking — of long observation, and the unique intimacy of crafting an image only by hand. When you see the piece, you’ll immediately think it is a photograph, a blown-out exposure that casts the rough texture of bark and branch in stark relief. But to know that someone made this, over weeks and months, and labored over its every millimeter, is to truly stand not only in the glory of the act but the thing itself, honored by depth of attention and care — all the more rare in this era of fleeting attention.
Odilon Redon, ‘Chimera,’ 1880–95
Redon, whose career spanned the mid-19th to the early 20th century, is likely best known for dreamy paintings and pastels he made toward the end of his life, which earned him a mention as an inspiration to the Surrealists that came along shortly after. But before all that, Redon, a Parisian, fought in the Franco-Prussian War as a young man, and his work before and after that harrowing experience was almost exclusively in dark tones of charcoal. He called them his noirs, and it wasn’t only about color, but a tone to fit his justifiably dark mood. “Chimera,” made firmly within the Belle Époque era of the French capital’s cultural resurgence, haunts the moment’s joie de vivre with spectral angst. That’s the product as much of astonishing skill as idea. The levitating mask, shadowy and hard-carved with heavily worked lines of gray and black, was made first, by both layering and scraping away charcoal and black crayon, which Redon stabilized using fixative to leave his many workings on the paper intact. The end result is an imposing spectre of doom that seems almost to leave the page as it looms over the indistinct haze of the city of light below — which, I think, might just say something of the artist’s mood.
John Wilson, ‘Violet,’ 1971
Wilson, a Bostonian, is best-known for his beloved “Eternal Presence,” his 1987 bronze sculpture permanently installed at the National Center for Afro-American Artists in Roxbury. But in a recent career survey of his work at the Museum of Fine Arts, the breadth and power of his work in charcoal, graphite. and oil stick was fully revealed. Wilson taught drawing at Boston University for decades, and it really was his milieu; “Violet,” made long after he had perfected the craft, shows you why. It crackles with equal parts affection and gestural fury, his subject’s hair and skin an eruption of close attention and care, worked and worked again; pay attention to the eyes, obscured by thick spectacle frame and left a smoldering mystery. All of this sits atop a simple tunic-clad torso that emerges fully formed with only a half-dozen brisk lines. I truly love this piece; with only his technical bravura, Wilson tells you where to look, and what to care about. And you do.
Charles Sheeler, ‘Totems in Steel,’ 1935; and ‘Feline Felicity,' 1934
Sheeler was part of a small cadre of thoroughly Modern American artists in 1920s New York clustered around Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery (the gang included Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe), But, in his fascination with the sharp edges of modern architecture and industry, he was a maestro of the rectilinear like no other. A technical genius, Sheeler often achieved in paint what even sharp-focused photography could not, cleaving the contours of built form that not just captured them but recast them as the coolly inhuman things that they are. “Totems in Steel” is a feat of uncanny precision in black crayon and graphite that feels like a pale totem of an inhuman industrial age; I didn’t think Sheeler could be any chillier, but he could. But all was not so hard and cold: “Feline Felicity,” a loving rendering of Duke, his cat, snoozing in the sun, both satisfyingly softens the Sheeler oeuvre and makes plain the breadth of his talent, from harsh precision to softness — though just as precise.
Gustave Courbet, ‘Artist at His Easel,’ 1847-48
Courbet once called himself the “most arrogant man in France,” and, well, you kind of have to give it to him. An unapologetic rebel who bucked convention at the Paris Salon in 1850 when he dared show paintings of farm workers and laborers meting out the unglorious tasks of everyday life, when haute Parisian society demanded grandiose depictions of great moments in history or classical mythology, Courbet did what he wanted, when he wanted, and how. He would prove to be prescient — Edouard Manet would upend the Salon’s pretense for good in 1865 with “Olympia,” an unapologetically frank nude portrait of a Parisian courtesan, in full recline — but fashion, clearly, mattered to him not at all. This piece is Courbet being Courbet, capturing the sometimes-lunch-bucket work of painting — on deadline, I assume, as he works in pajamas, with no fanfare or flourish. In that unremarkable scene, though, rests the truly remarkable: the soft-focus weariness of the artist, yoked in unglamorous labor; the enveloping, shadowy haze. It all comes together in a portrait of duty and obligation, softened into exhaustion by the skillful manipulation of shades only gray to black. It’s captivating. No notes.
SKETCH, SHADE, SMUDGE: DRAWING FROM GRAY TO BLACK
Through Jan. 18. Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge. 617-495-9400, harvardartmuseums.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com.