NEW YORK, NY.- Jill Newhouse Gallery will exhibit for the first time at the 2026 IFPDA Print Fair, April 9-12 at the Park Avenue Armory, in the Invitational section alongside The Drawing Center, The Hammer Museum and the National Gallery of Australia.
The gallery will present One of a Kind, a curated selection of European and American Master Drawings of the 19th/20th centuries featuring works by the gallery’s favorite artists: J.B.C. Corot, Victor Hugo, J.F. Millet, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and Edward Hopper. A portrait drawing by Picasso of Dora Maar and one by Welsh artist Augustus John are also on view.
Jean-François Millet, The Winding Road near Vichy, Auvergne, c. 1866-68. Pen and ink on paper, 5 1/4 x 8 5/16 inches
These works will provide a dramatic counterpoint to the editions and multiples on view at the fair. Drawings are at the very core of the creative process, and reveal how an artist journeys from observation to creation, and from creation to recreation. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the practice of drawing shifted from being a purely preparatory exercise to an independent, expressive art form. Driven in part by technological innovations that made the act of drawing and painting more transportable, artists began to go beyond the studio to capture and portray daily life. Academic expectations changed as well, and informal, or more spontaneous compositions began to be viewed as a new kind of realism, freeing artists to work from daily life, or outdoors in nature, and to expressively describe, rather than literally depict, what they saw.
J.B.C. Corot began to move away from linearity in his drawings by the 1850’s after he had learned to make cliché verre, a technique which combines aspects of photography and print-making. The soft charcoal of this rare late landscape drawing has an atmospheric composition similar to many of the late paintings, while the sinewy and minimalist brown ink line of the 1860’s landscape by J.F. Millet shows the influence of Japanese prints that was dominating the Paris art market by the mid 19th century. Japan had opened to trade with France in 1858.
George Sand, Landscape with a View of the Sea and a Fort. Watercolor on paper, 3 5/16 x 4 1/8 inches
A vivid pencil drawing done in 1908 by Welsh born artist Augustus John suggests the influence of John Singer Sargent in the rapid and vibrant pencil line. The startlingly direct gaze of the sitter shows the artist’s intense interest in the model, a young Gypsy boy named Demeter, whom John had encountered in Cherbourg.
Pierre Bonnard’s 1914 ink drawing, also done from life, depicts his lifelong companion and obsession Marthe. Bonnard was a constant canvas.draughtsman and this work is a study for a painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photographs of the artist in his studio show how closely he relied on drawing to make a painted composition, often pinning them up on the wall as he worked on a canvas.
Henri Matisse’s 1945 charcoal portrait of a seated model depicts one of several women from Martinique who posed for the artist during the French occupation. This series of drawings were used to develop a suite of fourteen etchings called La Martiniquaise 1946 to be published as a book illustrating poems by John Antoine Nau, a friend of the artist.
Edward Hopper, Study for Portrait of Orleans, 1950. Pencil on Bond paper, 10 1/2 x 16 inches
Pablo Picasso, whose work was banned from being shown by the Nazi’s, wrote a surrealist play which was performed privately in Paris on March 19, 1944 in the apartment of Michel Leiris, an important French Surrealist writer and ethnographer.
Picasso’s then girlfriend Henriette Theodora Markovitch (1907-1997), known as Dora Maar, was primarily known for her Surrealist photography and antifascist activism. Her turbulent nine- year relationship with Picasso influenced both of their artistic output in many ways. Dora was a frequent model for Picasso, although she later said of these works: “All his portraits of me are lies. They're all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.” Our drawing, a gift from the artist to the sitter, was done near the end of their relationship when Picasso was already secretly seeing Françoise Gilot, then also an aspiring artist. Our drawing is done on the flyleaf of Picasso’s 1944 play.
Less emotionally charged but no less closely observed are two drawings by American artist Edward Hopper from the 1950’s, study for the painting Portrait of Orleans and for High Noon (Truro). Hopper’s cinematic approach to composition is seen in the stark line and forms of these drawings, which are both done in preparation for major paintings.
IFPDA Print Fair
Booth T03, Park Avenue Armory
Friday, April 10 - 11-7 pm
Saturday, April 11 - 11-7 pm
Sunday, April 12 - 11-6 pm
Gallery contacts:
Jill Newhouse jill@jillnewhouse.com
Amelia Gorman amelia@jillnewhouse.com
(212) 249-9216
