Students Assemble Drawings Show

An exhibition for which undergraduates had the major responsibility opened in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery of the Hopkins Center on April 2. "Italian Drawings from the Bick Collection" is unique in having resulted from an undergraduate seminar at the College. The 46 drawings by Italian masters of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries were selected from the collection of Esther and Malcolm Bick of Longmeadow. Mass. Following the exhibition at Dartmouth, the drawings will go to five other museums in the East and South during 1971-72.

Working in the seminar on drawings conducted by Art Professors Franklin W. Robinson and John T. Paoletti, 13 undergraduates visited museums and public and private collections in New England and New York. Each student was responsible for a small number of drawings in the exhibition and prepared the scholarly notes for the illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition. Although catalogues of this professional nature are not uncommon in graduate programs and in the larger museums, the fact that the Bick catalogue was researched and assembled as part of an undergraduate seminar marks an important step in the development of the art curriculum at the College and points the way for future work at other institutions as well. The catalogue will have an international audience of scholars and will be indicative of the potential of American undergraduate education.

The 46 drawings chosen have an unusual variety in subject matter and medium. They range from sketches meant as first thoughts for a painting to landscape drawings, theatre design, finished portraiture, caricatures, copies after the antique, and minutely finished preparatory sheets for etchings and engravings. Colored chalks, inks, washes, and tempera on paper, parchment, and vellum are some of the media used in these drawings.

Among the more striking works in the Bick Collection included in the exhibition are a portrait of a Boy with aLute by the Venetian, Piazzetta; a sheet of three figural groups by the Genoese painter, Magnasco; a study for a ceiling fresco in the throne room in Madrid by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and a pen and ink profile portrait by Guercino.

Domenico Peruzzini's "Three Heads of Men" is donein black chalk, pen and brown ink.

"Boy with a Lute" by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta,a drawing in black chalk heightened by white.

Alessandro Magnasco's "Sheet of Studies is executed in pen and brown ink, brown wash,and black chalk heightened by white.