Last fall, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center hosted the traveling
Master Drawings exhibit, which featured more than 150 drawings ranging in date from the 1300s to the 1970s, all of them loaned by the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. The Worcester has an enormous collection, numbering into the high hundreds; in the choices made for the CSFAC show, organizers included many big names from the history of art. Some of the most impressive drawings were the finished-presentation works, in which washes and watercolors were used to fill in the inked lines. The show had a lot of American pieces, but English and Italian drawings were also found in abundance, and there were several fine modernist sketches by Europeans working in the mid-twentieth century. Major exhibits of drawings are almost never seen, so this one was surprising -- as well as being one of the best art shows, of any kind, around.