ART CITIES:N.York-Al Taylor

Al Taylor was an American artist known for his uniquely innovative approach to process and materials that encompassed two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional objects. Taylor ultimately sought to expand the possibilities of vision by creating new ways of experiencing and imagining space and his work provides the viewer with an insight into the artist’s thinking and his investigations of perception across several dimensions.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Morgan Library & Museum Archive

The exhibition “The Drawings of Al Taylor” explores the artist’s lyrical and witty compositions inspired by banal objects and everyday situations. Driven by curiosity and a sense of humor, Taylor drew maps of pet stains, imagined puddles hanging out to dry, and rendered elegant still lifes of tin cans suspended by wires. During his relatively short career, Taylor produced more than 5000 drawings, in which he combined technical skills, Old Master virtuosity, and graphic systems such as charts and diagrams. The exhibition shines a new light on Taylor’s practice, highlighting the artist’s distinctive draftsmanship through works spanning the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. The first U.S. museum exhibition devoted to this subject, “The Drawings of Al Taylor” comprises nearly 80 drawings and 20 sketchbooks, including many drawings that have never been shown before. Taylor began his career as a painter, and shifted to sculpture and drawing in 1985. Whether in graphite, ink, watercolor, or other media, the drawings he created between the early 1980s and his death in 1999, at the age of 51, display a fluidity and sensuousness that derive from his love of painting. Yet they are also intimately connected to his work in three dimensions, not as studies in the traditional sense, but as independent works dealing with similar subjects and issues. Taylor said, “At best a drawing should function as a pure drawing first, and only as a conceptual springboard second. I’m using concepts only as a good excuse to make a better drawing—a thing of beauty which can hold on that level all by itself, as a desirable object”. The ambiguous status of his drawings, poised between painting and sculpture, gives them a singular place in the history of the medium at the end of the twentieth century.In the creative process of Taylor’s oeuvre, some drawings precede the objects, while others follow. His three-dimensional pieces were usually fashioned out of unconventional materials, incorporating humble and sometimes humorous elements, which he shaped into delicate assemblages that offered a multitude of distinct viewpoints, providing him with possibilities to “see more.” These objects would subsequently form the basis of further explorations on paper, which documented the new visual perspectives that were opened up in real space. Moreover, the resultant drawings could then, in turn, inspire the spatial development of the three-dimensional pieces. In notes from 1990, Taylor wrote, “This work isn’t at all about sculptural concerns; it comes from a flatter set of traditions. What I am really after is finding a way to make a group of drawings that you can look around. Like a pool player, I want to have all the angles covered.”

Info: Curator: Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella, The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, Duration: 21/2-25/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 10:30-17:00, Fri 10:30-21:00, Sat 10:00-18:00, sun 11:00-18:00, www.themorgan.org

To help prevent the spread of COVID-19, the Morgan Library & Museum is closed through March 30, 2020.