Artistic drawing in historical and contemporary contexts
The paper expects you to place drawing in a history and to reuse that vocabulary when justifying your own work. Questions ask you to identify medium, function and spatial construction in an image, to compare two works, or to argue why drawing mattered at a given moment. Name-dropping without analysis earns little.
Landmarks to know
- Prehistory: Altamira (Cantabria) and Lascaux - charcoal and ochre on limestone, contour plus modelled mass, animal form observed closely.
- Renaissance: disegno as the foundation of the arts; Brunelleschi's perspective and Alberti's costruzione legittima; Leonardo's anatomical and compositional studies; Dürer's drawing instruments and treatises.
- Academies and the life room (17th–19th centuries); the sketch and plein-air drawing in the 19th century; photography displacing drawing's documentary role.
- Modernism: Cézanne's constructive directional stroke; Cubism's analytical space; expressionist line (Kirchner, Kokoschka); surrealist automatism and the cadavre exquis; Sol LeWitt's wall drawings, where an instruction replaces execution.
- Contemporary: drawing as installation, animation, digital and expanded practice.
Basque context
- Eduardo Chillida: drawing as spatial and architectural thinking - hand, gravity, emptiness.
- Jorge Oteiza: experimental and conceptual work, including drawing as research.
- Agustín Ibarrola, Néstor Basterretxea and Mari Puri Herrero extend the field into social, symbolic and painterly drawing.
- Local collections: Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Artium (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Chillida Leku (Hernani).
How the exam uses it
- Analysis: name medium and support, function (preparatory study or autonomous work), spatial construction, period and context.
- Justification: apply the same terms to your own drawing - technique, value structure, compositional decision.
Worked example
Compare two figure drawings. The first is an academic charcoal académie: single light, chiaroscuro, foreshortened arm, a preparatory exercise. The second is instruction-based: a grid or rule system, no modelling, the draughtsperson executing another person's idea. Reasoning: medium and support, function, spatial construction, then context - the academy's training economy versus conceptual authorship.
Traps that cost marks
- Listing names without analysing medium, function or space.
- Calling every twentieth-century work "modern" instead of naming the move.
- Confusing a preparatory study with an autonomous drawing.
- Ignoring the Basque and Spanish context on a Basque paper.
- Describing your own work without any technical vocabulary.