A single exhibition presented in three chronologically sequential parts, Drawing from the Modern surveys 125 years of innovation in drawing through The Museum of Modern Art's unparalleled collection of more than 7,000 works on paper. Part 1, 1880-1945, explores challenges to traditions of drawing; Part 2, 1945-1975, examines developments after World War II, focusing on the role of abstraction; and Part 3, 1975-2005, showcases contemporary drawing.
Emboldened by radically changing social, cultural, and economic conditions, artists featured in the first installation, Drawing from the Modern, 1880-1945, introduced new media and subject matter, and invented a host of new techniques: from the defiance of conventional conceptions of space and structure in works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró to the eruption of non-art materials and found ephemera in the collages and montages of Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, and Kurt Schwitters; from the rejection of the figure in abstractions by Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky to the embrace of randomness in Jean Arp's and André Masson's games of chance. The perfect laboratory for avant-garde experimentation, drawing offers a vivid view of the artist at work and the very shaping of modernism.