Reviews #12
Editor’s Letter: A Year of Trois Crayons
Tom Nevile
As the post-summer exhibition programme begins across the globe and the commercial art world kicks back into gear following its summer slumber, Trois Crayons is celebrating its first birthday. I won’t attempt anything as grandiose as a state of the nation address in this letter, but I will take this opportunity to reflect, look forward, and thank our readers, contributors, and team, for their engagement, encouragement and support for all our activities this past year.
Officially launched in September 2023, the past 12 months have seen change and growth at Trois Crayons, as we have ventured from the virtual realm into the physical one. In addition to these monthly newsletters, which have grown in scope (and length – my apologies), we have brought a board game into the world, Attribution!, launched in Paris at Nicolas Schwed’s gallery, organised an exhibition, ‘500 Years of Drawing’, held at Frieze’s permanent exhibition space in London, and arranged a number of talks, to accompany with the exhibition. Sebastien, Alesa and I were joined in January by Tom Mendel who was invaluable in helping us through the busy period. As planned, he now returns to the Nonesuch Gallery and Maggie Williams, formerly of Alon Zakaim Fine Art, joins the team as Managing Director, and will be taking the lead in planning our next events.
The past 12 months have reinforced my conviction that there is a healthy appetite for premodern drawings. The responses to this newsletter and our social media activity reveal as much. The attendance of over 2,000 people at our inaugural exhibition and the queue round the block on the opening night showed that the audience is not just a digital one. The exhibition highlighted the power of collaboration, timing and placement, for reaching new audiences. Popular monographic exhibitions devoted to the drawings of Botticelli, Michelangelo, Heemkerck and Claude, as well as thematic ones like ‘Bruegel to Rubens’, and ‘Drawing on Blue’ provide further evidence of the interest, and upcoming shows at the Fondation Custodia, the National Galleries of Scotland, the King’s Gallery, the Courtauld Gallery, the Albertina, and the Städel, to name but a few, devoted to Old Master drawings, speak to the institutional and curatorial commitment in the field. Specialist events like Master Drawings New York and the Salon du Dessin are important components in these local and global ecosystems, facilitating collaboration between museums, academics, journals, dealers, galleries and auction houses. Dedicated organisations like the Tavolozza Foundation, Bella Maniera and The Drawing Foundation all play their role in the promotion, support and organisation of these events and others of the kind, creating a rich and varied landscape and a multitude of ways in which to engage with drawings. Long may these collaborations and partnerships grow, innovate, and break down barriers to entry. This optimism must be tempered by the challenges faced by the field, with evolving tastes, application rates for art history degrees falling, minimal opportunities within the state sector, uncertainty at the major auction houses and a changing digital landscape, all of which serves to highlight the importance of the above, and strengthens my belief that this appetite for drawings must be nurtured from the ground up and given the oxygen to thrive.
But whither Trois Crayons in all this? As we move forward, we will continue to provide a digital home for drawing-related features, news and events through this monthly newsletter, website and social media channels and redouble our efforts to make drawings and their history as welcoming and accessible to new audiences as possible. Designs are also underway for the ‘Trois Crayons Museum Forum’, a new platform which will allow institutions to promote and crowd source information for less-studied drawings within their collections. The platform will provide a space for ‘problem’ drawings, where the artists, sitters or motifs have proved difficult to securely identify, and it will host moderated discussions where viewers can posit their ideas and suggestions. Whilst some drawings may always remain a mystery, others simply need to be seen by the right pair of eyes. The forum is designed, therefore, to bring these lesser-known but no less interesting drawings to as many engaged viewers as possible. Beyond the forum, we are also taking on visitor and participant feedback from this summer’s exhibition. The response was heartening and the enthusiasm for a centralised space to see and display drawings in London was made clear. More on these plans will be released in the coming months.
Collating these newsletters has been highly rewarding, and each issue has been enriched by the generous contributions of the curators, reviewers, interviewees and readers who have bought into the concept. My inbox is always open for suggestions and feedback. There is much to look forward to in the drawings world these coming months, and there are many projects afoot here at Trois Crayons. I look forward to it all.
