Fantasy and reality: drawings from the Sunny Crawford von Bulow collection.

PIERPONT MORGAN LIBRARY 

The hotel room looked so empty that I imagined all the drawings that were never there had been removed for an exhibition. I mean hospital room. Especially the drawing by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Rond-Point in the Park at Arcueil, ca. 1744-47, exquisitely boring: empty, the gray-green of storm clouds, it depicts neglected clefts of trees, an attenuated fountain, a low colonnaded structure in the distance, and a vague staircase leading, if anywhere, only to the recesses of what cannot be known. There are many different views of the abandoned park "executed by Oudry . . . , when he lived near the small chateau and gardens of the prince de Guise at Arcueil, near Paris." Kenneth Anger must have known of this drawing in "black chalks (two shades), heightened with white, in places gone over with a wet brush or stamped, on blue paper; traces of a ruled border in black ink"; in his Eaux d'artifice (Waterworks), 1953, a masked, gowned belle makes her way down endless stairs similar to Oudry's staircase, down and down. Water falls around the belle, who glances repeatedly behind her as if in anxious retreat, and the film, its air (in memory at least), is just as blue-gray, white, black, and ominous. A landscape referred to as "unearthly" and "almost surreal," Rond-Point in the Park at Arcueil is not so unearthly, not so surreal, just the vacant terrain of the fantasy life of a comatose woman the reality of which no one will ever comprehend.

Many of the drawings that were never really in this room but have been collected by her since the 1970s are centered by something static, dormant, so huge or inconsequential the mind cannot fully take it in, like death but not quite. In these drawings, when there are figures, many of them are ill. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres' Portrait of Charles Desire Norry (1796-1818), 1817, is haunted by a strange unease, the deft, finished head situating a suited body fading away to a few shrewd pencil slashes. The catalogue states: "Always insightful in his portraits, Ingres revealed a certain unhappiness or dissatisfaction on the part of his sitter whom Hans Naef characterizes as . . . a strangely uneasy-looking young man. . . . It is likely that the younger Norry was already in ill health." Monsieur Norry looks bored with it all - existence, nonexistence, his cravat, the button cinching his jacket, Ingres and his busy silence - but what is seen is less a portrait of Charles Desire Norry than that of a mind forever moving elsewhere. Even more apposite is Rosalie, charming daughter of Jean-Honore Fragonard and "pensive" model for the drawing in red chalk of Seated Young Woman, n.d., who died "from consumption in October of 1788 at only eighteen years of age." Seated, in her billowing dress, smelling of jasmine and lime tisane, her foot resting on a pillow, she removes or replaces a larger one behind her. The catalogue supposes that "the way in which Rosalie sits, holding a pillow, suggests that she may be tired, perhaps already ill," but refrains from connecting her dissolution to Sunny Crawford yon Bulow's own state, which with her remote but legendary taste still governs the acquisitions made in her name of the mostly 18th-century drawings of luxurious vacated estates and gentle, wearied ladies of leisure, studies of seashells, corn husks, and ruins. Sunny cannot be bothered to know the extent of her fabulous accrual. Its array, like the water-colored drawing of the vast rock of Capri, is only the weird physical embodiment of her improbable imponderability.

The Adolf Senff floral study lent by Cosima yon Bulow, done in "bodycolor, heightened with gum arabic on prepared paper" and recalling Florine Stettheimer's bouquets (a provocative intimacy with as well as an affectionate aggression toward mother), proved an uneasy memorial, hidden in a corner of an exhibit that was already an annex to a gallery, more a hallway. Senff's meticulous study captures beauty's numbness, which, like the calm of cut flowers (pink oleander, passion fruit, magenta, powder-blue, orange, and fuchsia blooms) and sometimes thought, is ruthless but no less fascinating.

Consider annexation from life, from reason; consider the inability to understand things that are between fantasy and reality, life and death. The esthetics of coma pinpoint the certain ineffable presence of the chill, obtuse and anesthetic, frequently kept at bay but always immediately encroaching.

- BH