The Stage of Drawing: gesture and act

Invited by Tate Britain to select works from the collection and develop a concept for this exhibition, Newman designed and supervised the installation of this exhibition in Sydney, Liverpool and London and worked with curator Catherine de Zegher (Executive Director, Drawing Center) on the installation of the work in New York.

Investigating the relationship between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ in the context of the Tate’s Modernist collection of two- and three-dimensional works and the Paul Oppe collection of eighteenth/nineteenth century drawings; the historic and cultural influences on artists and the context of drawing practice in England since the eighteenth century; and how an exhibition of both historic and contemporary works can be structured to mirror the theoretical ideas connected to its content, the methodology Newman formulated was to structure the exhibition into four parts, each with a different theme that collectively contextualised a wide range of works.

Through a systematic investigation of the collection, the examination of models and processes of drawing, research into individual artist’s work, the history of the Tate as an institution, and the social and political context in which individual works have been made, Newman’s aim was to articulate a notion of drawing within the context of contemporary art theory that draws on bodies of knowledge that inform much of present day discourse, such as the psychological and philosophical concepts of Freud, Lacan, Klein, Kristeva, Tisseron, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty and Antonin Artaud. A publication (ISBN 1854374885, Tate Publishing) documenting Newman’s selection of drawings and containing a conversation between Newman and de Zegher, as well as essays by Paul Valéry, Yves Bonnefoy, Michael Newman, Norman Bryson and Jean Fisher was produced to accompany the exhibition. Extensively reviewed, it is cited in Emma Dexter’s ‘Vitamin D: New Perspectives In Drawing’ and ‘Drawing from the Modern’, MoMA, New York.