Master Drawings New York Reveals 2024 Exhibitors and Early Highlights

Master Drawings New York (MDNY), the premier U.S. drawings showcase, has announced its exhibitors for the 2024 fair, on view from January 27 through February 3 in more than two dozen galleries on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The annual show, a well-established and highly anticipated hybrid art fair and art walk, will open with a preview event on Friday, January 26. The exhibiting galleries will feature exceptional and rare works on paper from the 15th to the 21st centuries, as well as paintings and sculpture.
 
The 18th edition of Master Drawings New York will feature 26 exhibitors from New York, London, Paris, Madrid, and Brussels including:  Abbott & Holder, London; Ambrose Naumann Fine Art and Harry Gready, New York; Didier Aaron, Paris, London, and New York;  Marty de Cambiaire, Paris; Christopher Bishop Fine Art, New York; Patrick Bourne & Co., London; Colnaghi Elliot Master Drawings Ltd., London, Madrid, and New York; Donald Ellis Gallery, New York; Galerie 1900-2000, Paris and New York; Graham Shay 1857, New York; Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co., New York; Hazlitt Ltd., London; Galerie Imperial Art, Paris; Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs, New York; Mireille Mosler Ltd., New York; Victoria Munroe Fine Art, New York; Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York; Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, London; Lullo Pampoulides, London; Robert Simon Fine Art, New York and Tuxedo Park, NY; Guy Peppiatt Fine Art, London; Robilant + Voena, London and New York; Trezza, New York; Shepherd W&K Galleries, New York; Sprüth Magers, London.
 
The Drawing Foundation, a newly formed New York-based nonprofit that celebrates the art of drawing, has partnered with MDNY to present a robust line-up of programming, including conversations, tours, lectures and special exhibition viewings at leading museums and galleries, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; The Hispanic Museum & Library; Christie’s; Master Drawings journal; West Harlem Art Fund; and the Society for the History of Collecting, among others. The Foundation will play a key role in developing the ongoing institutional partnerships associated with the fair since its establishment in 2006.
 
“We are greatly looking forward to the new Master Drawings New York, which will feature an extraordinary group of galleries that are international experts in the field,” said Christopher Bishop, President, Executive Director, Master Drawings New York and President, Christopher Bishop Fine Art. “All of us who work with drawings — museums, dealers, collectors, and historians alike — are invested in seeing that the joy of the study of drawings is passed on to new generations. This can only be done by knitting the community together ever more strongly and introducing new audiences to the fair.”
 
EARLY HIGHLIGHTS
Among the highlights at Master Drawings New York will be a J. M. W. Turner study of light and atmosphere in pencil and watercolor from the 1840s at Abbott & Holder. The work, which was once owned by John Ruskin, the noted 19th century writer, philosopher, and art critic, has not been on the market since 1966. The gallery will also show a rare William Blake drawing from 1819. One of the great poets and visionaries of the Romantic age, Blake is said to have made the drawing in the company of friends, late at night, conjuring the ghosts of the past.
 
A 1908 watercolor by Pablo Picasso will be exhibited by Patrick Bourne & Co. The work is on the market for the first time, having been acquired directly from Picasso in the 1920s. Depicting costumed figures seated around a bistro table, the watercolor is one of a series of four. Others in the series are in the collection of the Musée National Picasso in Paris. Galerie 1900-2000 is showing an exhibition of rare and exceptional works by protagonists of the Dada and Surrealist movements including work by Marcel Duchamp and Jean Dubuffet. Stephen Ongpin Fine Art will show a range of significant work from Gustav Klimt, Kenneth Noland, and Claudio Bravo.
 
A drawing by Pierre Bonnard, c. 1914, a study for the painting After the Shower, 1914, in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be on view at Jill Newhouse Gallery. In addition, a drawing of a bull by Rosa Bonheur, one of the 19th century’s greatest painters of animals, shows the undeniable skill that led her to become the first woman to be accepted into the Legion d’Honneur in 1865.
 
Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co. will exhibit a recently discovered and unpublished drawing by Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo. A Young Man Wearing a Studio Cap, Resting His Head on His Left Hand, c. 1755, was part of a series of 10 works considered the artist’s most original and expressive drawings, vividly demonstrating his technical prowess and inventiveness.   
 
One of the earliest drawings at Mireille Mosler, Ltd., is Anton Henstenburgh’s 18th century work Four butterflies and three moths, a delicately rendered ode to insects. Anton was one of an illustrious trio of natural history artists from the wealthy Duch port town of Hoorn, whose distinctive drawings defined the genre in Holland during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
 
An exhibition entitled Nordic Vision: Shaping the Modern Northern Landscape will be on view at Ambrose Naumann Fine Art and Harry Gready, showcasing young artists from across the Nordic region who were highly regarded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries but have not yet received international recognition.