The doodle in art, from Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly

From March 3 to May 22, 2022, theAcademy of France in Rome - Villa Medici presents a preview of the exhibition Gribouillage / Scarabocchio. From Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly, curated by Francesca Alberti and Diane Bodart, with the collaboration of Philippe-Alain Michaud. It will then be presented from October 19, 2022 to January 15, 2023 at the Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Through some three hundred original works ranging from the Renaissance to the contemporary age, the exhibition aims to highlight one of the lesser-known aspects of drawing, namely the many facets of doodling, from sketches on the back of paintings to doodles that become a real work.

By offering never-before-seen comparisons between works by great masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Titian, and Bernini, and works by celebrated modern and contemporary artists such as Picasso, Dubuffet, Henri Michaux, Helen Levitt, Cy Twombly, Basquiat, and Louis Pericles, the exhibition questions chronological orders and traditional categories (margin and center, official and unofficial, classical and contemporary, work and document) and places the practice of doodling at the center of artistic practice.

The exhibition grew out of a research project initiated by the curators, is co-produced with the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and is the result of international collaborative work. It has the support of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a partnership with the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome. The works on display come from prestigious Italian and European institutions, including the Uffizi Galleries, the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, the Museo e Real Bosco of Capodimonte, the Royal Library in Turin; the Opera Primaziale Pisana, the Louvre, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, Casa Buonarroti, the National Archives of State in Rome, and the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris.

The two exhibitions designed in a complementary way will each offer a selection of works and an original reading. The Roman exhibition featuring about 150 works is divided into six thematic sections in which Renaissance works will dialogue with contemporary works. These will include the drawings traced on the back of Giovanni Bellini ’s Triptych of the Madonna preserved at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, drawings by Benozzo Gozzoli, Fra Bartolomeo, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Titian, Taddeo Zuccari, as well as works by the Carraccis, Simone Cantarini, Gian Lorenzo Bernini from the most important Italian collections; or Leonardo da Vinci’s grotesque head on loan from the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and Delacroix’s notebook preserved at the National Institute of Art History in Paris (INHA).

A core group of works will be featured in both exhibitions, such as Giovanni Francesco Caroto’s Portrait of a Child with Drawing, photographs by Brassaï and Helen Levitt, various emblematic works by Cy Twombly, Asger Jorn, the Cobra group, Luigi Pericle, and Giacomo Balla.

The exhibition catalog brings together the three hundred works exhibited in Rome and Paris and will be published in Italian and French versions by Villa Medici and Beaux-Arts de Paris éditions.

The exhibition at Villa Medici will be accompanied by a series of lectures and screenings of artists’ films from the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris. Invited by the curators, six art historians, philosophers, anthropologists and museum curators will share their insights into the practice of doodling within their field of research.

Following are the appointments.

Thursday, March 17, 2022: Francesca Alberti (art historian, Director of the Department of Art History at the Academy of France in Rome), Diane Bodart (art historian and professor at Columbia University)

Thursday, March 31, 2022:Tim Ingold (anthropologist, professor emeritus at the University of Aberdeen)

Thursday, April 14, 2022: Mauro Mussolin (architect and art historian, professor at the University of Chieti Pescara)

Thursday, April 21, 2022: Vincent Debaene (historian of literature and anthropology, professor at the University of Geneva)

Thursday, May 5, 2022: Anne Montfort-Tanguy (curator at Cabinet d’art graphique du Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris)

Thursday, May 19, 2022: Philippe-Alain Michaud (curator in charge of the audiovisual collection at the Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris)

Each of these meetings will be preceded by a guided tour of the exhibition together with the curators. All information will be available at www.villamedici.it.

Image: Agostino Carracci, Teste caricaturali (c. 1594; pencil and ink on paper, 23 × 23 cm; Turin, Musei Reali, Biblioteca Reale di Torino) © MiC - Musei Reali, Biblioteca Reale di Torino / BRT Photo Archive

The doodle in art, from Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly

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