The Pleasure in Drawing

Idea

Idea But what is it, then, that we call form? It is imperative to take up this problem, since drawing represents par excellence the element of form, or a form—and, as we have suggested, not only within the domain of the visual arts but in all artistic domains, since in all these domains one can discern a register, element, or valence to which the idea of drawing lays claim—without being simply a metaphoric use of the term.3 Leonardo da Vinci writes: ‘‘These parts [of music] are constrained to arise and to die in one or more harmonic tempos which surround a proportionality by its members; such a harmony is composed not differently from the circumferential line which generates human beauty by its [respective ] members.’’4 Form is the ‘‘idea,’’ recalling the word chosen by Plato to designate the intelligible models of the real. Idea signifies for Plato, according to the Greek term, nothing other than 5 I D E A ‘‘visible form’’ (to which one might add that the ‘‘visible’’ is form’s primary register of reference, because that register maintains form in the foreground, distinct, and in this way ‘‘formed.’’ By contrast, and according to another distinction, drawing [dessin] opens form to its own formation ). In fact, the most recent translations of Plato substitute ‘‘Form’’ for the more traditional ‘‘Idea.’’ ‘‘Intelligible form’’ takes nothing away from the field of the visible; it demands only that this visibility adapt, not to the immediate and interested perception of things, but to the judgment and aim [visée] of their sense and truth. Just as the visible form of the table presents us with its use and affordance [disponibilité] as furniture, whether for eating, writing , or climbing up on, so the ‘‘idea’’ of the table (tabula rasa, multiplication table, tablature) carries the sense of a general affordance for . . . affordance itself, in other words, the form of a surface on which things are arranged, the way form comes to light [mise en evidence] and presence (to sit down at the table, to put something on the table, the negotiating table, the Holy Altar [la Sainte Table]).5 This form gives sense or truth to the ‘‘table.’’ One must thus understand that ‘‘sense or truth’’ (employed here as equivalents ) are far from constituting simply the ‘‘intelligibility’’ of the sensible. At the same time, this intelligibility is nothing other than a more demanding, more intense grasp of sensible propriety itself. Or yet again, in distinguishing these two terms, one could say that the truth is the point or moment of interruption of the movement and opening up of sense. Interrupted, suspended, the drawing/design of sense [le sens en son dess(e)in] reveals at once its tracing out 6 I D E A [tracé] (its substance or bearing) and the truth, which is not its completion but, on the contrary, its very interruption. It is for this reason that early on the word drawing took on, if not exactly the meaning, then the value associated with a sketch or a study. In The Art of Painting, Roger de Piles has a chapter ‘‘Of Designs,’’ which begins: ‘‘The Designs, of which we intend to speak here, are the Thoughts that Painters commonly express on paper in order to execute the Work they are planning. One should number among Designs the studies made by the Great Masters, in other words, the Parts they have drawn after Nature, such as heads, hands, feet & entire Figures, Draperies , Animals, Trees, Plants, Flowers, and finally everything that enters into the Composition of a Painting [Tableau]. Because whether one considers it a good Design in relation to a Painting for which it is the Idea, or in relation to some Part for which it is a Study, it always deserves the attention of the Curious.’’6 (Matter—to recall a word that remains inseparable from ‘‘form’’—is the name of form’s resistance to its deformation . It is not a formless ‘‘content’’ that form comes to mold or model but rather the thickness, texture, and force of form itself. We will return to this claim later in order to understand how color and drawing are not as exterior to one another as might be thought, even as they remain irreducible and irreplaceable.) Sketchbook 2 ‘‘With charcoal, he marked on the wall the ideas of things as they came to mind; it is customary for sharp...