'A love letter to drawing' - Harvard Gazette

"At Harvard Art Museums, paintings by renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso, John Singer Sargent, Edgar Degas, Piet Mondrian, and Georges Seurat capture viewers' attention with their rich colors and practiced brush strokes. A fall exhibition strips down the styles that made these artists, and others, famous to expose raw expression and experimentation in the most basic form of composition - drawing."

"The exhibition was curated by Knipe, as well as Division of European and American Art curator Miriam Stewart. The pair spent over a year carefully choosing works that would not only show off the museums' collection of rarely seen works but also demonstrate the versatility of simple tools in the hands of artists."

""Some of our favorite drawings are up in this exhibition," Knipe said during a recent tour of the gallery. She pointed to a large Degas charcoal drawing last brought out for exhibition in 2005. "After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself" by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas. "This drawing by Degas was in perilous condition and lived up in the conservation lab for decades because it's on tracing paper, which is super thin, and it was then adhered to a thicker board," Knipe noted. "It needed to come off because it was starting to fracture.""

Harvard Art Museums presents Sketch, Shade, Smudge: Drawing from Gray to Black, featuring around 120 works in chalk, charcoal, graphite, and crayon spanning the 19th–21st centuries. Paintings by Picasso, Sargent, Degas, Mondrian, and Seurat are contrasted with stripped-back drawings that expose raw expression and experimentation. Curators Penley Knipe and Miriam Stewart selected works over more than a year to showcase rarely seen pieces and demonstrate the versatility of simple drawing tools. Conservator Penley Knipe restored fragile works, including a Degas tracing-paper drawing that required removal from an adhered board after decades in the conservation lab. The exhibition highlights drawing’s expressive power and material fragility.

Read at Harvard Gazette