IN 1909, Braque and Picasso painted their first truly cubist pictures. In the same year Matisse painted La Danse. It was the beginning of the adventure that we call modern art. Much changed in the visual arts in the century that followed. Nevertheles
s it would seem at first sight that the shift away from traditional art forms that has been so conspicuous in the last 30 years was just a natural continuation of the radical transformation begun 100 years ago; just a further point in the same long trajectory of creative innovation. Maybe so, but before deciding consider one crucial change that took place about then and that, instead of broadening artistic horizons, has narrowed them; it broke a chain that linked even the most radical modernists back to the Renaissance and in consequence, even as they embraced the possibilities of new technology, actually placed a severe limitation on what artists can do. I mean the demise of drawing, its demotion in art teaching from key discipline to just one option among many.
From the Renaissance, drawing was the one essential tool of all artists; it was the first instrument of visual inquiry; it provided the building blocks for any undertaking in other media and was the primary instrument of visual expression and response. Facility in drawing may be innate, but the skills required to exploit and develop any talent need to be taught; the instant, intuitive connection of eye, hand and brain can only be established by discipline and practice. This was so thorough in the studios of the old masters and the art schools that succeeded them that for the great artists of the past drawing was as instinctive and immediate an expression of thought as hand-writing. Trained in this tradition, Matisse and Picasso were both great draughtsmen, but where are their successors now? Have we casually lost something that was the very backbone of our art? And for the future, if it we were ever to seek to recover it, who could now teach the teachers?
I am prompted to these reflections by the exhibition at the National Gallery of the collection of drawings belonging to Jean Bonna. The title of the exhibition, Raphael to Renoir, indicates the scope of his remarkable collection, but it also implicitly presents this continuity, the unbroken line of drawing that links the Renaissance to Impressionism and indeed beyond. This collection has been put together in little more than 20 years. Monsieur Bonna is from Geneva and is a very senior Swiss banker. Clearly it is unlikely that he has to worry too much about money when he is indulging his collecting habit. (He also has a collection of French literature which is said to be one of the finest in the world.)
Nevertheless, without going into any detail, Michael Clarke, director of the National Gallery and one of the curators of this exhibition, assured me that Monsieur Bonna had not spent fabulous sums on building up his collection. It is also very personal and not a museum collection. He has taken the best advice, but the choices are his own. Nor has he sought to illustrate any particular narrative in the history of art. His drawings are mainly Italian from the 16th to the 18th centuries and French from the 17th to the 19th. There are also some wonderful Dutch and Flemish drawings and a scattering of others, but none of this is programmatic. He doesn't buy drawings to fill notional gaps in some imagined historical or geographical story, but for that very reason the collection taken together illustrates all the more effectively the centrality of drawing in the story of Western art as I outlined it above. Wherever you look in the four centuries covered by the drawings here, you see the same mastery.
Central to the discipline of drawing was the study of the human figure, though in teaching this was more often done from casts of the antique than the live model. The prime exemplar and the model which for several centuries all art teaching followed was Raphael and at the head of his collection Jean Bonna has a very good and very characteristic Raphael drawing. It is one of the beauties of drawings that so often we see in them, not a finished statement, but the artist's thought processes and this one, a study of several figures in action, was done in the studio from live models in preparation for a tapestry of the Conversion of Saul. Comparing the drawing with the finished tapestry, you can at once see how Raphael's understanding of the figure and his ability to convey it in lines that are at the same time both sharply observed and full of energy is what gives power to the finished composition. Drawing is its armature. If that were all that drawing can do, this discussion might still only be academic, but as the range of works in the exhibition makes very clear, drawing is an art form in which very limited means can produce endlessly variable results. There are several heads here, both studies and portraits, that have the same quality of vivid observation as the Raphael for instance, but the vitality of the artist's hand becomes a witness to the living presence of the sitter. Among them are a head of a girl by Raffaello del Colle and a moving study of a girl's head by Federico Barocci that has echoes of Piero della Francesca. There is also a wonderful study in red and black chalk of a girl with a coral necklace by Jacopo Vignali. She has a melancholy expression and the drawing is so alive her melancholy touches us, even at the distance of four centuries. Watteau captures something similar in a girl's head among three on a sheet of studies and which he was to use in the NGS's lovely painting, the Fêtes Venitiennes. As with Watteau, so too in a beautiful drawing by Boucher of a girl's head seen from behind, the artist's hand, its touch and movement visible in the chalk marks on the paper, conveys his sensual delight in what he is drawing. Then in a superb study of a girl washing her neck, Degas could simply be Boucher's most brilliant pupil so strong is the continuity in the tradition that joins them.
François Clouet is more detached and analytical in a portrait head of François II of France at about the age of 12. (In the National Gallery of Scotland we might expect to be told that this fragile boy was, however briefly, not only King of France, but also by his marriage to Mary Stuart in effect King of Scots.) A drawing like this, or Hans Hoffman's delightful study of a wild boar piglet, show what a powerful analytical tool drawing can be and it was indeed for a long time an invaluable partner to science. It can move in the other direction too, however. Monsieur Bonna's favourite among his drawings is, he says, a study of the Holy Family by Parmigianino. The Holy Family, shepherds, angels, stable and landscape are all realised with just a few rapid strokes of the pen and some splashes of dappled wash. Here we see, too, part of the special alchemy of drawing: the paper itself beneath the marks the artist makes is an integral part of the image and can become both light and space, a wide field in which the imagination can take wing and fly. This is the quality that was exploited so brilliantly by the great landscape artists and it is in his choice of landscapes that Monsieur Bonna's taste comes closest to my own. There are three landscapes by Claude here for which I could happily trade the rest of his collection – or perhaps not quite all of it. If I ever had them, I don't think I could part with the Boucher or the Degas.
• Until 6 September
